On a free afternoon a couple of days later Gibbie decided to have a fireside chat, as he called his family meetings with the puppets on the mantel. Admitting how threadbare the costumes his mother had made for them had become, Gibbie said he hoped this year he’d get far enough ahead to have new ones made. Using their many voices, he staged a discussion where they talked about what kind of new costumes they’d like. Then, as always, he closed the meeting by picking up Tiny Tim by his head and having him utter his blessing.

Later that same day Sammy called. He’d arranged a trip to Atlantic City for six of the dozen workhorses on his Dickens list to do their stuff at six casinos. Gibbie hadn’t been included, being in Sammy’s bad books since the Kinky Carol business. But Grayson Reed, one of the chosen, had chickened out, spooked by Lamar Hooper’s murder. The gig was Gibbie’s if he got over to Sammy’s apartment building chop-chop. Sammy warned him he wasn’t going to wait around.

There wasn’t much time. After a quick shower, Gibbie swept his hand puppets into a shopping bag with a collective “break a leg” for good luck and headed crosstown. The security man in the lobby knew him and pointed to the door to the underground garage. Gibbie hurried down, reaching the foot of the stairs in time to see Sammy’s SUV roll up the ramp to the street. He didn’t run after it. Sammy wasn’t going to stop. Gibbie stepped out of the light. He didn’t even want to give Sammy the satisfaction of seeing him standing there in his rearview mirror.

As Gibbie hugged his shopping bag in the shadows, he saw a strange shape on the cement floor in the SUV’s parking space. Now it sat up, then stood, a man in overalls. Though his hair and beard had turned quite gray, Gibbie recognized Bosley Heck, one of the founders of the Carolers Club.

Heck, a man obsessed with Dickens, worked for ten months of the year every year at a variety of jobs — auto mechanic, locksmith, electrician. But come November he put everything aside, spread on his English accent, got into his Dickens outfit, and read “A Christmas Carol” until the holidays’ very last gasp.

The Carolers jokingly called Heck The Dickens, for the man was a purist whose every word, bit of theatrical business, and detail of his costume down to the cashmere-checked pantaloons he wore and the two small roses, one white, one red, in his buttonhole, he could document from contemporary accounts and photographs of the author.

Gibbie watched as Heck picked up the creeper he’d been lying on and went up the ramp to wait by the garage door, intending, Gibbie was sure, to slip out as he’d slipped in with the next arriving or departing car.

Gibbie hurried back up the stairs and gave a shake of his head to the security man. Out on the street he heard the mild drum roll of the garage door as a car entered. Now ahead of him on the sidewalk he saw a figure carrying a creeper. Gibbie followed after him.

Bosley Heck had been a towering presence in the business when Gibbie was starting out. The man regarded his rival Dickens impersonators with a courtly, if wary eye, as an old dog might view a pack of romping puppies. When the puppeteer introduced himself and described his act, Heck had welcomed him with a gracious “The more the merrier.” But Gibbie suspected Heck regarded acts like his own with contempt.

Some say Heck’s descent into madness coincided with Vera Vail’s off-Broadway success in Desperate Housewife, the Mrs. Bob Cratchit Monologues, a strident feminist retelling of the Dickens story. Others blame the arrival in New York of Cornelius O’Kelly, the Dublin Nightingale, and his Christmas at the O’Carrolls, an evening of Irish readings, clog dancing, and song where he accompanied himself on the electronic keyboard. (His “O Tiny Tim, the pipes, the pipes are calling” left no dry eye in the house. His “The Irish Heavyweight’s Promise,” where a pug-ugly swears in a letter to his referee father, “I’ll be home for Christmas. You can count on me,” was no less memorable.)

However Heck’s madness began, he came to believe he was, in fact, Charles Dickens besieged all about by impostors and upstarts bent on turning his Christmas classic into a three-ring circus. His behavior became increasingly erratic until one night during a reading Heck got stuck on the first “Bah! humbug.” He couldn’t get beyond “Bah,” repeating it again and again until the audience started shouting it back at him. Finally someone came out from behind the curtain and led a “bahing” and bewildered Heck offstage.

The man had ended up in a mental institution. Gibbie could imagine how he’d gotten back onto the street. Recently with medical costs rising, the state started returning non-violent inmates into the community, counting on improved drugs and local facilities to care for them.

Gibbie followed Heck down an alley alongside one of the few remaining Mexican restaurants on the Bowery. The man hid his creeper among the garbage cans and went in the back door. Through a window Gibbie watched him punch a time clock and take his place at a large dishwashing machine.

Gibbie went home. Tomorrow he would call Lieutenant Mason, mention missing his ride to Atlantic City, and say he saw Bosley Heck on the street outside Sammy’s apartment building carrying a creeper. He’d tell Mason he only put two and two together when he read in the morning paper about Sammy’s terrible accident.

As far as Gibbie was concerned, the booking agent would be no great loss. A man who called his dozen Dickens workhorses “The Twelve Drays of Christmas” certainly deserved to die. As for the other five in the vehicle, Gibbie told himself he’d had no actual hand in the accident. Whittle, whittle.

Wiki was one of those who stood at the side of the open grave early next morning, as Miguel Dalgardo was interred in the dry soil of Pico. The rest of his boat’s crew attended too, but Wiki thought that he was probably the only one who felt any real grief. When he looked around at the blazingly blue sky, the dusty trees, and the distant yellow maize fields, it all seemed unreal. Black-clad women stood at a distance while the priest intoned in Latin, and a young boy in a surplice waved a censer that emitted a thread of fragrant smoke.

As the first clods of earth hit the top of the plain coffin, Captain Smith walked away, followed by the boat’s crew, with Wiki. As Wiki trudged down the narrow path, he carefully watched his feet, noticing yet again how pebbles rolled to the side and then disappeared. There was no movement at all in any of the burrows that dotted the side of the cliff.

When they were finally at sea, with all fair-weather canvas spread, it felt a lot more like real life. Then, to Wiki’s surprise, Mr. Starbuck, the first mate, called for all hands to attend the auction of Miguel Dalgardo’s belongings. The officers did not know about the passion for making wills on the Paths of Duty, he deduced.

He looked about for Isaac Norton, to see how he was taking it. As expected, the harpooner was hurrying toward Mr. Starbuck, and saying urgently, “Sir, an auction ain’t necessary, and I’ll tell you why—” However, the first mate wouldn’t listen, ordering Isaac to assemble with the others.

Wiki stood to one side as the crew arrived and shuffled about in a huddle. They all watched as Miguel’s sea chest was brought out of the steerage and placed at the foot of the foremast. Wiki’s thoughts were flying. Isaac said again, “Sir—” but Wiki interrupted. Before he even fully realized he was going to do it, he stepped forward and said very firmly, “I would like to bid two dollars for Miguel’s chest, sir.”

Everyone swung about and stared at him. Isaac Norton shouted, “You can’t do that!”

Wiki lifted an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”

“Damn it — you’re the man who drew up his goddamned Last Will and Testament, so you know that you can’t do that, Wiki Coffin!”

“And where in his will does it say I can’t buy his chest?”

“He left everything to me, and you know it!”

“He left you the contents of his chest, not the chest itself.” Wiki drew out the little notebook where he had copied the details of every single will he had drawn up. Slowly, very aware of the weight of the concerted attention of everyone on deck, he turned to the right page and read out the simple sentence that had made up the body of Miguel Dalgardo’s will. “ ‘I hereby bequeath the contents of my sea chest to my friend, Isaac Norton.’ ” Then, as the silence dragged on, he repeated, “So I would like to buy the chest, sir, once Isaac has claimed the contents.”

“But that ain’t right!” Isaac exclaimed.

Mr. Starbuck, who had been staring from Isaac to Wiki and back again from the black shadow of his wide-brimmed hat, shifted for the first time, and said, “It sounds reasonable to me. The right thing for me to do is empty out this here chest, give you all the contents, and then take bids on the chest itself, just as Wiki says.”

Isaac went white and shouted, “No!” — but too late. Without bothering to argue anymore, Mr. Starbuck bent down, opened the lid, and tipped the contents out.

The first thing Wiki saw was the famous shore-going shirt. It was as gorgeously embroidered as Miguel had promised, and he felt another stab of sorrow. Next to it was a black wallet, and when Mr. Starbuck’s thick, tobacco-stained fingers opened the wallet, a stream of gold coins fell out.

“So Miguel was the man who robbed that merchant in Fayal!” Captain Smith exclaimed. “No wonder he was so relieved to get on board and away!”

Until Wiki heard his voice, he hadn’t realized that Captain Smith had come on deck to witness the disposal of Miguel’s earthly goods. He turned to him and said evenly, “Sir, if you send a boat into Pico, I think Pedro will still be willing to sign articles, seeing that you are going to be in need of another harpooner.”

The captain’s little eyes studied him shrewdly. “You don’t reckon Pedro was Miguel’s killer?”

Wiki nodded. “Isaac Norton was the man who pushed him off the cliff,” he said.

Everyone swung around and stared at Isaac, who had gone whiter than ever. “He was my friend!” he shouted. “Why the devil would I kill him?”

“Because you had found out he had the wallet of gold,” Wiki said with utter sureness. “You were the one who started the craze for making wills on board the ship, and you made certain that Miguel knew that you had made him your heir. After that, it was only a matter of time before Miguel returned the favor by leaving everything to you. Then all you needed was a good chance to finish him off. Climbing the cliff was the perfect opportunity because Pedro and Miguel had already quarreled publicly, and you had the perfect scapegoat. Once Pedro was out of sight ahead, all that was necessary was to give Miguel a shove.”

Isaac Norton shouted, “You can’t prove that — not in a thousand years!”

“You did it yourself, when you were stupid enough to embroider your lie with that tall tale of a snake,” said Wiki with disdain.

“Why, what the hell do you mean?”

“There are no snakes on Pico.”

“What?”

“There are no snakes in the Azores at all.”

The shadow of the Venetian blinds, etched by the sun on the wall of the breakfast nook, faded out and sharpened again as clouds tumbled across the sky on this breezy June morning. Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn yawned over the headlines in the morning paper while half-listening to the chugging and burbling of the electric percolator, the clicking and clatter made by birds rummaging in the roof gutters for food and nest-building materials, and the creaking of the east side of the house warming up.

The giggle of his digital phone in the bedroom summoned him to the cool, dark side.

“Cy, it’s Laporte. You’re not on the road yet, are you?” Lieutenant Gavin Laporte, third watch commander. “On your way in, touch base with Dollinger and Krasnoy at the corner of Jardine and Pace. They’ve got a citizen down.”

“Drowning?”

“Shooting. Elderly female. Apparently robbed.”

“ID?”

“Ida Claire Blanford. Single, aged seventy-four. Retired schoolteacher. Shot down within a few yards of her house. An evidence tech will be at the scene by the time you get there.”

The corner of Jardine and Pace wasn’t exactly on Auburn’s way to headquarters. The two streets met at a right angle and ended, at the south bank of the river, in an older residential district that was gradually degenerating into a slum. It had once been a flourishing urban neighborhood, but its development had been arrested by the natural barrier of the river, and property values had begun to decline as many of the houses slowly disintegrated in the hands of absentee landlords.

Between the river and the point where Jardine and Pace dead-ended into each other there was a broad grassy levee planted with oaks, which were just now coming into leaf. Auburn saw a cruiser and an evidence van parked on the street, and festoons of yellow tape at the crest of the levee, fringed by the inevitable crowd of onlookers. Climbing up himself, he found Patrolmen Fritz Dollinger and Terry Krasnoy down near the water conferring with Kestrel, the evidence technician from headquarters.

Ancient sycamores grew along the water’s edge, some of them leaning far out and ready to topple because their massive roots had been undermined by the scour of the current when the river was high. But it hadn’t rained for more than a week now, and the river had dwindled to a sluggish stream barely an eighth of a mile wide, leaving broad, slimy mud flats along both banks.

The body of the victim lay, on a sloping stretch of bank well out from solid ground, under a blue plastic sheet weighted at the corners against the breeze with stones. A black leather handbag rested on top of the sheet. Auburn noticed a rowboat equipped with a trawling motor moored to a tangle of wild shrubbery a few yards downstream. On the far bank of the river he could see a few spectators clustered on balconies and at upper windows.

Patrolman Krasnoy gave him a quasi-military salute. “Good morning, Sergeant,” he said. “We didn’t know if they were sending you or the Coast Guard.”

“Are you sure this isn’t a drowning?”

“We didn’t do an autopsy yet,” said Dollinger, “but her clothes are dry. Except for right around the hole in her chest. Take a look.”

Kestrel, the evidence man, registered acute distress. “Afraid I’ll have to veto that for now,” he said. “You can’t get near the body without making more tracks in the mud, and I haven’t shot any pictures yet.”

“I can wait,” said Auburn. “What do we know?”

“A fisherman in a boat spotted the body an hour or so ago,” said Dollinger. “He’s around somewhere. He already filled out a 201, but we asked him to hang loose till you talked to him. When he saw the body, he tied up, climbed the levee, and called Public Safety from a bar and grill up there. The guy who runs the bar came across for a look at the body and recognized her as the woman who lives in that house right there.”

He pointed to a huge, old white frame house, not a hundred yards away. Its long narrow back yard extended all the way to the riverbank, from which it was separated by a stone wall. The property was well maintained, and beds of spring flowers in the side yards relieved the severity of the house’s boxy architecture.

A black iron fence enclosed the entire lot except for the driveway. An old-fashioned mailbox was mounted on the fence next to the gate at the sidewalk in front of the house. Even at this distance Auburn could read the name Blanford stenciled on it.

“Anybody home over there?”

“Nobody came to the door,” said Krasnoy. “The man from the bar, Casteven, says she lived alone.”

Auburn glanced at the handbag lying on the plastic sheet. “Any confirmation of her ID?”

“Couple credit cards in the name of Ida Blanford. No cash in the handbag, just a bunch of keys and some personal stuff. DMV says she didn’t have a current driver’s license because of substandard vision.”

Kestrel, having taken several photographs for orientation, passed the handbag to Auburn and removed the sheet from the body. A murmur of ghoulish satisfaction went up from the growing crowd.

The dead woman lay spread-eagled on her back, with her head about a foot and a half from the water. Her eyes were half open, her refined features set in a sallow mask, her bobbed white hair disheveled. She wore no jewelry. Her floral print blouse clearly showed a blood-ringed hole just left of center in the chest. There were smears of mud on her light blue slacks but none on the soles of her shoes.

While Kestrel went on taking pictures, Auburn examined the contents of the handbag — a hairbrush, a handkerchief, a ring of nine keys, a pair of thick trifocals in a crushproof case, a package of chewing gum. A compact billfold contained two credit cards, a Social Security card, and a senior citizen’s discount card, but no money and no further identification.

“Rigor is pretty well advanced,” Kestrel said, now squatting beside the body. “It would have been cool down here by the water last night, but even so, I’d say she must have been dead since midnight.”

“Somebody should have heard a shot,” said Auburn.

“The guy at the bar and grill didn’t,” said Dollinger. “He lives upstairs over there. We didn’t ask anybody else yet, but that’s right up top on our agenda.”

“One wonders,” said Krasnoy, “why they didn’t just throw her and her bag in the river.”

“They may have tried, and missed the water in the dark,” said Dollinger. To Auburn, he added, “They must have tossed her from up here on the grass. Terry and I made those footprints when we covered her up, and they’re the only ones near the body.”

“Any bloodstains or other traces around here on the grass, or over on the sidewalk?”

“No blood that we could see,” said Krasnoy, “and no shell. Here comes our ancient mariner,” he added under his breath.

Auburn turned to see a stocky middle-aged man stepping with pompous self-assurance over the yellow tape and descending the bank. With his floppy-brimmed hat adorned with fishing flies and his sunburnt nose, he looked like something straight out of a beer commercial on TV. When he got closer, Auburn sensed that he had indeed just had a beer, if not two, at the establishment across the street.

His name was Fred Shannoy; he was on a two week vacation from his job with an advertising agency. “I’m not what you’d call a serious fisherman,” Shannoy assured him. “Anything I catch I throw back. I figure it’s going to be full of lead or mercury or radioactive wastes anyway... Hey, I don’t even like fish.”

Auburn obliged him with the expected chuckle. “Do you own the boat, Mr. Shannoy?”

“Rented. I showed the papers to the officers here.”

“Where did you cast off this morning?”

“The landing at the park up in Stillwell, around seven. Told them that too. I was just drifting with the current, looking for a shady spot to tie up, when I saw this old gal lying here on the bank. Kind of like a sunbather, you know? Except she was in the shade and she had all her clothes on. And then when I got close enough, I saw she was... uh... well, you know. Not with us any more.”

Just the sort of circumlocution, thought Auburn, that one might expect from an advertising man.

“So I pulled in and tied up downstream there and came ashore.” He glanced briefly at his muddy shoes. “The place across the street, The Green Fish, wasn’t open for business yet, but there was a truck there delivering meat, so I went in and called you guys. That... that’s a bullet hole, isn’t it?”

“That’s what it looks like. Are you familiar with this area?”

“No, sir. Never been here before, either by land or by sea.”

“Did you see anybody here on the bank besides the dead woman?”

“No. Not on this side of the river, anyway. I saw a few joggers and pedestrians over on the downtown side.”

Auburn was making a final check of Shannoy’s written statement when Nick Stamaty from the coroner’s office arrived. Dark and heavily built, Stamaty dressed like a college president, moved with the grace of a sumo wrestler, and radiated the sincerity of a Sunday-school teacher.

“Straighten your ties, guys,” he said, before even looking at the remains of Ida Blanford. “The camcorders are coming.”

Auburn stepped up to the brow of the levee and peered down into the street. “It’s Channel Four,” he reported to the others. “They usually behave pretty well.”

After sending Shannoy off to resume his fishing, Auburn filled Stamaty in on the details thus far known. Stamaty unslung his camera case and checked the position of the sun. “Let me get some pictures. Then we’ll see if one of those keys gets us in the house.”

While waiting for Stamaty to finish his work around the body, Auburn walked west along the top of the levee, away from where the TV crew were setting up, and surveyed the scene from a distance. A quarter of a mile downstream stood a massive steel-truss railroad bridge, no longer in use.

The broad, shallow river had never supported much traffic, but since the rebuilding of the dam at Tippettsville in the 1960’s to prevent spring flooding, it amounted to little more than a stream. A hulking wharf and warehouse, part wood and part brick, stood at the water’s edge just this side of the railroad bridge. A row of cars parked outside the warehouse indicated that it was still being put to some use.

Stamaty was adding the final touches to a sketch on a clipboard when he caught up with Auburn. His left little finger was hooked through Ida Blanford’s big ring of keys. “Looks like point-blank range to me, Cy,” he said.

The crumbling sidewalk in front of the house had been marked long ago for repairs with red spray paint and then apparently forgotten. The mailbox was empty. The hinges on the gate needed oil. But the tree-shaded lawn was neatly trimmed and free of weeds. They waited a full minute after Auburn manipulated the knocker on the front door before starting to try keys in the lock.

The house was dark, quiet, and cool. Not a trace of disorder or a speck of dust spoiled the old-fashioned but opulent decor, as if Ida Blanford had known, the last time she left, that she would never return. Auburn recalled that she’d been a schoolteacher. From the entry hall they passed into a parlor that looked like a principal’s office, a kitchen like a high school physics lab, and a dining room as bare as the refectory of a convent. Every light they turned on in the parlor blazed with maximum wattage. A reading glass rested on the desk, another next to the chair in the front window.

Further exploration revealed a pantry, another parlor, and an enclosed back porch facing the river. The rear parlor was somewhat more habitable than the front one, with shelves of old books, family photographs in silver frames, more bright lights, and more magnifying glasses. Every window on the ground floor was closed and latched. Deadbolts were shot on side and back doors.

There was no computer in the house, no answering machine attached to any of the antiquated dial phones, not even a television set. Of the bedrooms upstairs, Ida Blanford had used only the front one. In the other rooms they found stored furniture, locked trunks, cardboard cartons secured with heavy cord. The heirs, if any, were going to have a circus digging through the spoils and apportioning them.

The basement was nearly empty, probably because of the damp that reigned there. Another of the keys on the ring got them into the detached garage. There was no car — just a broken porch swing, several dozen red clay flowerpots, a formidable array of gardening implements, several pieces of furniture that belonged in a landfill, and a bicycle that belonged in the Smithsonian.

Returning to the back parlor for a more focused search, they found an address book containing the address and phone number of a Dale Blanford in East Atlas, about seventy-five miles away. Auburn used his cell phone to call East Atlas.

“Dale Blanford.” A man in his thirties, his voice crisp and assertive.

“This is Detective Sergeant Auburn calling, sir. About a Miss Ida Blanford. I believe she’s a relative of yours?”

“She’s my aunt.” Still crisp, now expectant and slightly challenging.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, sir. Miss Blanford was found dead this morning near her home.”

“Found dead? What happened to her?”

“At first glance it looks to us like she was shot in the course of a robbery.”

The man at the other end of the line muttered something that might have been profanity. “Was this a break-in?”

“No, sir. There’s no evidence of that. We’re inside her house now. We found it locked and we don’t see any evidence of damage or theft. Her body was found on the riverbank just east of here.”

“You can understand this comes as kind of a shock. I’m trying to get myself together.”

“Are there other relatives besides yourself?”

“No. Well, my sister, but she lives in California. What do I need to do?”

“As soon as our investigation here at the scene is finished, your aunt’s body will be removed to the mortuary. The coroner will want you to go there and make a formal identification. I’m going to turn you over to Mr. Stamaty from the coroner’s office if you’ll hold the line just a moment.”

Stamaty expressed sympathy in businesslike tones, gave Blanford information and directions, and handed the phone back to Auburn.

“This is Auburn again. I’d like to talk to you eventually so we can work up a profile on your aunt for our report and possibly get some ideas on what happened to her. I’ll give you a number that will reach me no matter where I am, and I’d appreciate it if you’d call me when you get to town.”

“Okay, but, like I told the other gentleman, it may be sometime this afternoon before I can get away.”

After Auburn hung up, Stamaty explained that Blanford was building a deck somewhere in the wilds of Carney County. “Says he can’t leave until he’s sure his guys are far enough along to finish up without him.”

They locked the house and returned to the riverbank. Kestrel had already left the scene and the body was once again draped in blue plastic. The crowd of spectators was getting bored and thinning out. The TV crew idled patiently in the shade. After touching base with Dollinger and Krasnoy, Auburn crossed the street to the bar and grill on the corner of Jardine and Pace.

The Green Fish looked as if it might have started out as a neighborhood restaurant and sunk slightly in status in order to keep its owner out of the red. The front window bore the image, in cracked and fading paint, of a spirited bass writhing at the end of a line amid churning foam. Lettering, somewhat less faded, offered BEER, LIQUOR, AND FOOD. The door facing Jardine St. was marked FAMILY ENTRANCE. Auburn went in.

The place was a little busier than might have been expected at nine thirty in the morning. Three men, each in his own world, were downing eye-openers at the bar, which ran back along the left side, opposite the windows facing out on Pace Street. A stainless steel lunch counter, reminiscent of an old-fashioned diner, was set at a right angle to the bar. Behind it a stocky man in a white apron and chef’s cap wielded skillets and spatulas with skill and dispatch.

At the counter and at booths and square tables in the front part of the building, seven people were having breakfast. A couple of tinny speakers in the ceiling gave forth the current output of a local rhythm-and-blues station. In the narrow spaces among the tables, a solitary waitress was juggling plates and cups. Most of the customers, even the ones at the counter, seemed to be watching the crowd across the street through the plate glass window with the picture of the green fish. Nobody, not even the waitress, paid much attention to Auburn.

He stepped to the counter and caught the cook’s eye. “Excuse me, sir. Police officer.” He showed identification.

“Scotty Casteven. Chief cook and flycatcher.”

“Are you the proprietor?”

“That too.”

“I understand you identified the body of Miss Ida Blanford across the way this morning?”

“I don’t know about the Ida part.” Casteven, tending an order of hash browns and a couple of waffles, wasn’t looking Auburn’s way. Everybody else in the place was. “I never heard her first name before. We always called her Miss Ramford — you know, like Ramrod. That’s what my wife called her because she walked so stiff.”

“But you definitely recognized her?”

“As the old gal that lived in the white house across the street, sure. I’ve seen her out there a thousand times, getting the mail out of the box, working in the garden, raking leaves, walking to the bus.” He broke off to shout some cryptic message to the waitress.

“Would your wife know anything more about her?”

“Maria died three years ago. Heart.” His expression clouded and he turned back to the grill.

“Sorry. What time did you close last night?”

“We close at eleven sharp except Friday and Saturday.”

“I understand you live here on the premises. Were you home last evening?”

“Yes, sir. I already told those two cops over on the bank that I didn’t hear any shots last night, no yelling, no commotion, nothing.”

The waitress kept circulating among the tables, refilling cups and glasses, removing dirty dishes, taking further orders. Two people left their table and stepped to the cash register where the lunch counter and the bar intersected. Casteven put down his tools, wiped his hands on his apron, and took their money.

In the circumstances there was obviously no question of a private interview. Auburn decided to turn that to his advantage. Raising his voice slightly, he addressed the whole bunch. “If anybody here has any information about the woman who was killed across the street last night or about what happened to her, I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know. If you don’t want to talk to me here, you can call Public Safety any time day or night and ask for Sergeant Auburn.”

In compliance with the mysterious laws that govern crowd behavior, nobody was looking at him now.

The couple who had just left had vacated the table in the window. On a whim, Auburn sat down there himself. The heat and humidity were building up outside, and from here he had a view of Ida Blanford’s house and the adjacent riverbank, except for the site where the body lay.

Eventually the waitress stopped beside his table. “Did you want to order something, Officer?”

Her name tag said “Darla.” She was fighting a losing battle with the calendar over the issue of turning thirty. She was lean, hungry, and overdecorated, the kind of woman Auburn’s father described as “a shark in mascara.”

“Just coffee, thanks.”

“Cream and sugar?” she asked over her shoulder, already halfway to the serving stand in the corner where two coffeepots steamed gently on hot plates.

“No, thanks.”

Auburn sipped his coffee slowly and meditatively, dividing his attention between the shrinking crowd outside and the customers of the The Green Fish. The bar and grill may not have been the heart of the neighborhood, but it probably reflected the rhythm and flavor of local life as accurately as anyplace else.

Customers left, others came in. They all seemed to know what was going on across the street. And from the way the newcomers looked at him, Auburn sensed that they also knew, as if by telepathy, that he wasn’t an ordinary patron but a detective engaged in the investigation. From time to time one of them lingered by his table, ostensibly peering across the street through the plate glass window with the picture of the fish on it, but also taking the opportunity to give him the once-over at close quarters.

Most of them were obviously regulars, but Auburn suspected that a couple of the bar patrons had hiked the six blocks from the Greyhound bus station on Guinan Boulevard for quick nips during layovers. The regulars, nearly all of them men, didn’t look a prosperous lot. There were the usual neighborhood retirees, a few younger people possibly out of work for one reason or another, a couple of unclassifiables.

Scotty and Darla worked smoothly together, communicating in the quaint jargon of the hash slinger and taking turns serving drinks at the bar, collecting payments at the cash register, and feeding dirty dishes to the huge automatic dishwasher in the corner. The radio droned and twanged on, at times barely audible above the clatter of dishes and the mutter of voices.

Because the two streets out front dead-ended into each other, there was virtually no traffic. The only cars and trucks that ever moved into Auburn’s field of vision seemed to belong to patrons of The Green Fish. Over on the levee, he could see Dollinger and Krasnoy giving brief and no doubt suitably vague answers to the television reporter. Kestrel was going over the sidewalk inch by inch like a man who has lost a contact lens in the snow. Ida Blanford’s house stood solemn and empty, the front parlor ablaze with sunlight streaming in an east window.

Eventually Darla came back with more coffee.

“Do you live here in the neighborhood?”

“I used to live in the apartment upstairs.” She rested the coffeepot on the table, leaned closer, and lowered her voice. “After Scotty’s wife died he moved out of their place on Eversole, kicked me out, and moved in here himself. I’ve got an apartment now at the other end of the Randolph Street Bridge.”

“Are you here every day?”

“Six days. We’re closed Sundays. I work till eight, when the dining room closes.”

“Has there been any kind of trouble in the neighborhood recently?”

“Like what kind of trouble?”

“Break-ins, vandalism, gangs, drugs...?”

“Highmore’s Grocery right over on the other corner closed up about three months ago. They said it was because they didn’t have enough business, but Scotty and I think it’s because they had two holdups in a row around Christmas time.” She picked up the coffeepot.

“Did you know Ms. Blanford?” Auburn asked her.

She put the coffeepot down again. “Not to talk to. I saw her outside almost every day. She used to drive a big old Lincoln to go shopping and to go to church on Sundays, but we heard she totaled it and lost her driver’s license because they said she was legally blind. Since Highmore’s closed, you’d see her coming back from the bus stop with shopping bags maybe a couple days a week.”

“Have you noticed anything unusual going on over at her place in the past few days?”

“No. Sometimes a younger man stops in the afternoon, usually on weekends. Sometimes he comes in a truck and other times he brings his family in a car — wife and two little boys. But I haven’t seen them over there in the last month or two. I always figured they were family.”

“Could I get your name, miss?”

She glanced down to make sure her name tag was showing. “Darlece Fontaine.” She spelled both names.

Contrary to his usual procedure, Auburn didn’t ask for an exact address and he didn’t start a file card until she had gone away to serve other customers, and then he made only the sketchiest of notes.

A ten-year-old boy put his head in through the family entrance and called “Paper!” A man on one of the barstools asked if he had the world soccer scores.

Across the way, Dollinger and Krasnoy took off in their cruiser, probably on a call. A few minutes later an ancient hearse stopped in the street outside with a screech of brakes, and two mortuary attendants disappeared over the brow of the levee with a body bag and a folding stretcher. After a lengthy interval they reappeared, loaded the remains of Ida Blanford into the hearse, and drove off with a squeal of rubber.

The TV crew, having captured that bit of history on tape, went their way. Some time later Stamaty and Kestrel left the scene also. At the house next to Ida Blanford’s, a woman in a housecoat was shaking a dustmop into the breeze while her dog ran sniffing around the front yard. A pale, frail man with a cane was promenading slowly up and down the sidewalk in the late morning sun. Auburn sat on behind the grimy window with the painted green fish.

It wasn’t the standard way to conduct a homicide investigation. He should have been leafing through Ida Blanford’s private papers in search of suspicious associations, requesting a background probe on her and her nephew from Records, canvassing the neighborhood to learn if anyone had heard a shot, checking on recent holdups, muggings, and similar crimes in the district — in particular, the two holdups at the grocery across the street. Instead, he sat here soaking up the atmosphere of the bar and grill — the smell of cooking varied by an occasional whiff of liquor, the babel of voices, the jangling of music.

At a few minutes before eleven he went to the men’s room and called headquarters on his cell phone. His immediate superior, Lieutenant Savage, had received a radio report from Dollinger and Krasnoy, who had questioned neighbors up and down the block without finding anyone who had heard a shot the night before or observed anything unusual in the vicinity of Ida Blanford’s house. Savage had ordered a background probe on the victim and was talking to Fire and Rescue about having the river dragged for the weapon.

“I don’t know if you remember it,” he said, “but they found the gun that killed Stan Karlowski on the bottom of the river about a quarter of a mile from where you are right now.”

“I remember. It looks like the killer tried to toss her body in the river. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tossed the gun in too.”

Auburn indicated somewhat vaguely that he’d be at the scene for a while yet. He didn’t mention that he was hanging out in a bar and grill.

On his way back to his table in the window he was intercepted by Scotty Casteven, who was sipping a soft drink in the back corner of the bar during a lull in activity. Auburn wondered if Casteven had just overheard his half of the phone conversation.

“What does it look like, Officer?” he asked. “A stickup, or just some psychopath?”

“We’re still checking. There wasn’t any cash in her purse. You saw the bullet hole.”

A glass-fronted cabinet next to the side entrance was crammed with every imaginable kind of green fish — figurines in china, wood, plaster, and plastic, coffee mugs, bottle openers, key-chain guards, a small pillow, a large light bulb, a electrified singing rubber bass mounted on a plaque.

Casteven shook his head and looked at the floor, which needed a good scrubbing. “It’s pretty scary, you know? Your neighbor getting blown away right across the street.

“We had some pretty rough stuff going on when we lived in the Drysdale District, but that was just break-ins — kids with crowbars. Did they ever catch those guys that held up the grocery here last winter? Highmore swore it was the same guys both times.”

“That case is still open,” said Auburn, winging it. “Have you ever had any trouble like that here?”

“Not yet.” Casteven rapped on the bar for luck.

“Do you own the building?”

“Oh no. Lease.”

“Your business seems to be good.”

“Don’t you believe it. My business is rotten. I can’t compete with the fast food places across the river, or the bars over there that cater to the neurosurgeons and the stockbrokers from downtown.” He finished his drink and filed away the empty can under the bar. After a glance toward the dining room, he assumed a more confidential air. “When my wife died, I lost my bartender and cashier. And I have to pay Darla a lot more than she’d get downtown because the old soaks and deadbeats that hang out in this place would rather blow their Social Security checks on booze and cigarettes and lottery tickets than leave tips.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Auburn. “Is it just the two of you all the time here?”

“My brother-in-law Greg takes over the bar a little after three, when he gets off his other job, and he stays till eleven. We shut down the kitchen at eight, and that’s when Darla and I knock off. We’re closed Sundays.”

Darla sang out, “One country up and a side of Murphy, no dash.” Casteven cinched his apron tighter around his ample middle and went back to the grill.

In spite of the proprietor’s grim report, the place seemed to be filling up for the lunch hour. A group of six East Indians dressed as workmen came in together and took adjoining tables. An elderly man, his features blurred by age like the face on a well-worn coin, sat down at the table next to Auburn’s. Obviously a regular, he put on a pair of reading glasses and studied a morning paper he’d brought with him instead of the menu. His hands were bony and gnarled like those of a retired plumber, the nail of the left thumb permanently cloven.

Darla appeared at Auburn’s side. “You working up an appetite for lunch? Our special on Thursdays is Cajun-style chicken giblets and rice.”

Auburn already knew that from the slate over the lunch counter. At the very mention of the word “Cajun,” his stomach performed the preliminary steps of a war dance. He chose Salisbury steak, which, although sometimes scarcely worth the effort of chewing, is hard for even a novice chef to ruin.

Time passed. Auburn was so absorbed in his watch on the empty house across the street and his attention to the pulse of life around him that he didn’t even realize that he’d gone through his soup, salad, and main course until Darla swept away his empty plates. “How we doing here? How about some dessert? The peach cobbler’s fresh today.”

“Just some more coffee, thanks.” Glancing yet again across the street, he saw a pickup truck pulling into Ida Blanford’s driveway and canceled the order. He paid his check at the cash register and left all his change from a ten and a five on the table, partly because of what Casteven had said about tips and partly because he expected to spend more time later at The Green Fish.

By the time Auburn got across the street, the driver of the truck, a lanky man in his late thirties, had mounted the bank and was staring down at the spot where Ida Blanford’s body had been found.

“Mr. Blanford?” Auburn showed identification.

“Yes, sir.” Wearing a housepainter’s cap with the visor turned backwards, sunglasses with small round lenses, and time-tattered camouflage fatigues, Blanford looked like an alien in a low-budget sci-fi flick made in the 1960’s. Underneath these trimmings he had a crew cut and a square, matter-of-fact face.

“We talked on the phone earlier.”

“I was going to call you from the house.”

“Have you been downtown to the mortuary?”

“Oh, yes.” Blanford shook his head as if to dispel the grim recollection. “That’s where they found her, huh? I can remember standing down there throwing rocks in the river when I was about a year and a half old, and Aunt Ida yelling at me to get out of the mud.” He stared unseeingly out over the water through the midday haze.

“Do you know if she’d had any kind of trouble lately with neighbors, vandals...?”

“If she did, she didn’t tell me about it. What I can’t understand is what she was doing outside here after dark.”

“She may not have been outside when she was killed. Would she have been likely to let anybody in the house that she didn’t know?”

“Not unless they forced their way in. Caution was her middle name.” He turned to face the house. “Look at those lightning rods. And I’m sure you saw the smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors all over the inside.”

He took out a ring of keys, the same bunch Auburn had found in the dead woman’s purse, which Stamaty had evidently handed over to him. “I better check inside and make sure everything’s okay. She kept a lot of money upstairs. Whoever shot her could have made a real haul if they used these keys instead of just cleaning the cash out of her purse.”

They climbed down from the levee to the sidewalk. “This was prime real estate when my grandfather built the house in the twenties,” Blanford said. “And there wasn’t any saloon across the street back then, either.”

“Did your aunt ever have any trouble with the people over at The Green Fish?”

“I wouldn’t say trouble. Mostly she acted like the place wasn’t even there. She used to complain about the noise around closing time, especially on Saturday nights. And the lines waiting for green beer at six o’clock in the morning on St. Patrick’s Day.”

They went through the gate with the squeaky hinges and up the walk. “When was the last time you saw your aunt alive?”

“We had dinner here a week ago Sunday — my wife and I and our two kids.”

“You said you and your sister are the only living relatives?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you’re probably the only heirs?”

“I guess so.” The thought didn’t seem to distress him unduly.

Once inside the house, Blanford took off his cap and slid his sunglasses up to the top of his head. He cast a wary and perhaps now a proprietorial eye here and there as they moved through the immaculately kept rooms. At the foot of the front stairs he got out the keys again. “I haven’t been allowed upstairs since I was about six,” he said, “but I remember exactly where she kept her money.”

He led Auburn to Ida Blanford’s bedroom and on into a windowless alcove fitted out as a dressing room. Here, concealed by a wall hanging, was a squat antique safe with the manufacturer’s name splashed across the front in fancy script. Without hesitation, Blanford selected a key and opened the safe. Except for a few papers, which didn’t include a will, the safe was empty.

“There ought to be a lot of cash here,” he said, moderately agitated. “She inherited a couple million from my grandfather — he owned a brass foundry, Kingmark Castings. And she used to lend money to people starting up in business — young doctors, lawyers... she even staked me when I started up my construction business.”

“Seems like a tough racket for an elderly lady to be in.”

“You didn’t know my aunt Ida. She could stir her tea with one hand and whip a tiger with the other. You get like that after teaching seventh and eighth grades in an inner-city school for about forty years. She’d still be at it if her eyes hadn’t gone out on her. Glaucoma and a bunch of other stuff.”

“Where did she conduct her business with these people she lent money to?”

“Right down in the front room. Always late in the evening. She tried to keep it hush-hush. I told her a thousand times she could get higher interest with better security if she just put that cash in the savings and loan. But she said the savings and loan people already had too much of her money. My wife thinks lending money at low interest was just her way of helping people who were in a bind but wouldn’t take charity.”

“But surely these loans weren’t cash transactions?”

“Oh yes they were. And she kept the cash right in here, along with the IOUs. Anyway, she did when I was a kid, and Aunt Ida was one of those people who never change anything from one year to the next except their clothes. My Dad used to say she could never bring herself to do anything for the first time.”

“Would she have had jewelry in here?”

“She never wore any. Teachers weren’t allowed to wear jewelry when she started out, and she never changed that either.”

“Okay. Let’s not touch anything else here. I need to get an evidence technician back on the scene. Your aunt was evidently killed inside the house and then dumped on the riverbank to make it look like a street killing. Who besides you would have had access to the house or would have known about the safe? A boyfriend?”

Blanford grunted. “If she had a boyfriend, that would be the biggest revolution since bottled beer.”

They found the name of Ida Blanford’s lawyer in her address book downstairs. Blanford arranged by phone to meet the lawyer immediately and took off, leaving the keys with Auburn. After reporting the latest developments to Lieutenant Savage, Auburn went back to The Green Fish.

By now the place was getting to be a bit too familiar. The heavy smell of grease and fried onions, the cracked sugar bowl at the cash register where patrons could drop pennies they received in change, the squeaky place in the floor on the way to the restrooms. Scotty was busy behind the bar, where nobody was paying attention to the talk show on the large-screen TV. Darla was apparently taking a break in a back room. The dining room was practically deserted. Auburn sat at the same table in the window and resumed his watch on the street.

Darla eventually reappeared, plied him with more coffee, and asked if he was making any progress with the case. When Kestrel, the evidence technician, arrived back at the scene to go over the house, Auburn went across the street just long enough to give him the keys and confer with him briefly.

A little before three o’clock, a fresh flurry of activity on the levee told him that something was happening down by the water. A motley gang of neighborhood children, probably bored to death after only a week or so of summer vacation, had been drawn to the scene of action as surely as flies to spilled ice cream. Auburn crossed the street again.

There wasn’t enough open water within the city limits to justify a standing team of river investigators under the Department of Public Safety, much less the purchase and maintenance of the necessary equipment. But Fire and Rescue had both the equipment and trained underwater investigators. Three men, two of them in diving gear, were working in a small motor launch just opposite the point where Ida Blanford’s body had been found. By the time Auburn reached the top of the levee, the kids were already down at the edge of the water. “You gonna use radar?”

“You mean sonar,” said one of the men from Fire and Rescue. “I think we can manage without it. The river isn’t that deep here. Your favorite hoop star could walk across the bottom without getting his wig wet.”

Auburn waved to the men in the boat and watched while they staked out the area under investigation, laid down pattern lines of yellow polypropylene rope, and began methodically exploring the river bottom by touch and with magnetic grapnels. Since they weren’t under his orders and obviously knew exactly what they were doing, he soon went back to his table at The Green Fish.

He now had the dining room almost entirely to himself, but the bar trade was picking up as people got off work. In the business district north of the river, the posh bars would be having happy hour for people wearing silk shirts and handmade shoes. Here in The Green Fish, the men and women hunched over their drinks at the bar were palpably blue collar workers and practitioners of the manual trades. Pace Street was parked solid, mostly with panel trucks and pickups. A big Allied Bell truck with an overhead hydraulic platform stood near the corner.

Since there was nothing to see across the street, Auburn, with yet another cup of coffee before him, turned his attention to the people around him. The atmosphere seemed to have undergone a subtle change. A man who was a stranger to Auburn, a tall curly-haired blond, was tending bar. That would be Scotty Casteven’s brother-in-law Greg. He had a diamond in each earlobe, but he wore no rings.

Casteven was busy at the dishwasher and Darla was helping at the bar and the cash register. It was obvious that relations between the two men were strained. When they communicated at all, it was in monosyllables, and their tone was stuffy, if not positively hostile. On the other hand, the chemistry between Darla and the new bartender, Greg, evidently went far beyond that of mere co-workers.

Were there hidden alliances here, ancient enmities, smoldering resentments? Or did the electricity in the air stem from the murder of Ida Blanford? A fatal drama had been played out within a stone’s throw of the bar and grill. The impression was growing on Auburn that somebody here knew more than they were telling about the murder across the street — that the solution to the whole thing might lie right here if only he could penetrate beneath the surface.

He became so absorbed in that puzzle that, even when he saw Kestrel and the divers holding a lengthy conference on the levee, he didn’t go outside. But that was partly because the TV crew from Channel 4 had just arrived back on the scene.

Hours passed. The radio station started repeating R&B records that Auburn had sat through that morning. Evidently the dining room did little business in the evening hours. At five fifteen, the only patrons having dinner were two women with bulging shopping bags stowed under their table. In one of the two booths on the windowless side of the dining room, two college kids with his-and-hers spiked hair were lingering over soft drinks and wearing out their welcome. Auburn ordered Salisbury steak again.

He felt so isolated in his nook in the window that, when his cell phone rang, he answered right there instead of seeking more privacy.

“Where in the world are you, Cy?” asked Lieutenant Savage.

“Still at the scene of the Blanford homicide, tying up a few loose ends.”

“Well, you must be well camouflaged. Even Kestrel of the hundred eyes couldn’t find you. Have you talked to Dollinger and Krasnoy?”

“Not since this morning.”

“Then you’re about three days behind. Kestrel found fresh bloodstains on the basement floor in the victim’s house. And the divers from Fire and Rescue struck gold.”

Auburn lowered his voice slightly. “They found the weapon?”

“They found the weapon and more, nicely preserved in a waterproof plastic bag. Are you ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Okay, first we’ve got an old Colt .38. Recently fired, one chamber empty. No ballistics match yet, but that’s the caliber of the slug they took out of Blanford’s chest. Not registered with any local agency. Next we’ve got a pair of leather work gloves. The right one shows what looks like powder burns. Chemistry tests are in progress. Both gloves have bloodstains, the same type as the victim.”

“What about latent prints?”

“Kestrel’s still waving his magic wand over the stuff, but no fingerprints so far. But there’s something almost as good — a wadded-up strip of adhesive tape with the name Johnston printed on it in indelible marker. And on the sticky side there’s another name, also in black marker but in reverse, like it was picked up from whatever the tape was stuck on. That name is Rakovy.” He spelled it.

“Now here’s the kicker, Cy. Rakovy was the maiden name of Maria Casteven, the late wife of your witness at The Green Fish tavern across the street from Blanford’s house. The only Rakovy listed in the current city directory is a Gregory J., who works for Allied Bell as a lineman and troubleshooter.”

As Auburn furtively twisted sideways in his seat for a glimpse of the man behind the bar, his heart skipped a beat. At least, he felt something like a blow from a child’s fist in the middle of his breastbone. Before speaking again, he covered his mouth with his hand, as if he thought Greg Rakovy — who wasn’t even looking his way — could read lips.

“I’m pretty sure I have the subject in view as we speak.”

“You are? Where in this world are you calling from, Cy? It sounds like a shopping mall.”

“I’m at The Green Fish.”

“And you think Rakovy is there?”

“Pretty sure,” Auburn said again.

“Well, can he hear you? What are you doing, playing poker with him?”

Even though the sight of people talking on cell phones in public places had become so commonplace that the few patrons around him were ignoring him completely, Auburn saw fit to mumble through a heavily veiled account of his current position and the grounds on which he believed that the number one suspect in the murder of Ida Blanford was the second-shift barman at The Green Fish.

“Okay, Cy,” said Savage at length. “I’m trusting you to play this one by ear.” Auburn waited until Rakovy was at the back end of the bar running a batch of glasses through the steamer before he approached him and showed identification.

“Mr. Rakovy?”

“Help you?”

“I wonder if you’d mind answering a few questions?”

The bartender stared at him with dead-fish eyes in a deadpan face. “What about?”

“I’m sure you know we had a shooting death across the street last night. Were you here at work last evening?”

“Till eleven.”

“Is there somewhere we could talk privately?”

“Not right now. Unless you want to get me lynched.” Patrons at that end of the bar were watching and listening as well as they could over the hubbub of voices and the relentless din of the TV. Two of them were clamoring for refills.

“I imagine Scotty would take over for you for a few minutes.”

Rakovy bridled, now frankly hostile. “So who died and left you in charge?”

Remarks like that usually got Auburn’s blood flowing, and sometimes prompted him to retaliate in kind. But, conscious of the increasingly attentive audience, he was determined to do things exactly right.

“This is a homicide investigation, sir,” he said. “You were on or near the scene around the time of the shooting. That makes you a material witness.” Auburn kept his voice quiet and steady, almost amiable — but not quite. “If you don’t want to talk here, we can go downtown to headquarters — that’s up to you. But I’m not going to go away, so you might as well get it over with.”

By this time Casteven had appeared to see what the commotion was all about. He took over behind the bar while Auburn and Rakovy adjourned to a stuffy back room where full and empty beer kegs were stacked beside a walk-in freezer.

Auburn first verified that he was talking to Gregory J. Rakovy and recorded his address and phone number. Rakovy worked full-time for the telephone company and (for the past eight months) part-time at The Green Fish. He had left immediately after locking up at eleven P.M. the night before and had gone straight home to his apartment and to bed, since he had to get up at five thirty to go to his other job. He lived alone. He hadn’t heard or seen anything unusual across the street at Ida Blanford’s house, and he denied being acquainted with her.

“Have you ever been inside her house? Ever talked to her? Out on the street, on the phone? Ever have any contact with her by mail?” Rakovy gave unqualified negative answers to all these questions. Auburn avoided saying anything that might tip him off to the fact that the gun and other articles had been recovered from the river bottom.

Had Ida Blanford ever been inside The Green Fish? Did Rakovy know Ida’s nephew Dale? Had anybody at The Green Fish had any association with either of the Blanfords? No, no, no. By now Rakovy’s face was set in a disdainful smirk. The oppressive heat from the freezer condenser and the sour fumes from the empty kegs were making Auburn sick.

On his way to his car he took a long look at Rakovy’s truck. Because he didn’t yet have probable cause for search and seizure, he confined his attention to inspecting it from the sidewalk. Then he climbed the levee for another view of the spot where Ida Blanford’s body had been found. Although it was still broad daylight, the shadows were gathering under the sycamores and lights were coming on in the apartment buildings across the river. A cool evening breeze rippled the water and carried a vague threat of rain.

Auburn didn’t sleep very well that night, probably because of all the coffee he’d put down at The Green Fish. But he was at his desk before eight thirty the next morning, shuffling through background probes on Ida Blanford and the people he’d talked to yesterday. The deceased had a distinguished history as an elementary school teacher and later, when her vision began to fail, as a volunteer tutor in a literacy program. And she had indeed been a woman of vast wealth. But her moneylending activities had never come to the attention either of law enforcement authorities or of the other agencies and services that participated in the surveillance system.

Her nephew Dale’s construction company was operating in the black and had a favorable rating with the Better Business Bureau. Fred Shannoy, the playboy fisherman, and Darlece Fontaine, the waitress at The Green Fish, had so far kept on the right side of the law. Melvin J. Casteven was deeply in debt to two credit card companies and a local savings and loan. Gregory J. Rakovy had a long history of frequent job changes and had incurred several fines for minor infractions of traffic laws.

Stamaty had sent Auburn a preliminary autopsy report from the coroner’s office across the street in the courthouse. A single .38-caliber slug, fired almost at point-blank range, had penetrated Ida Blanford’s right ventricle and vena cava, producing a massive and rapidly lethal internal hemorrhage. Routine tests had shown powder burns on both her hands, probably sustained as she struggled with the killer. Anyway she hadn’t shot herself through the heart and then tucked the gun in a plastic bag and tossed it into the river. The bullet and the gun had already been delivered by police courier to the regional ballistics lab.

No member of the public had come forth to report any unusual activity around Ida Blanford’s house on Wednesday night.

Auburn went up to Kestrel’s lab under the skylights to view the rest of the evidence for himself. Kestrel took a red plastic box marked “Biological Hazard” out of a locked cabinet, and after donning a pair of rubber gloves, he laid out its contents in a neat row on a sheet of clean paper. The resealable plastic food bag in which the other articles had been found was made of heavy-duty opaque polyethylene with a metallic sheen; it was jumbo-sized, big enough to hold a ham or a whole turkey.

The strip of white adhesive tape with “Johnston” lettered on one surface and the negative of “Rakovy” on the sticky side had been stretched out flat and mounted on a sheet of clear plastic. The blood on the leather work gloves had turned the color of chocolate syrup. The gloves were generic, worn, and untraceable. According to Kestrel, intensive examinations for trace evidence had turned up only the usual nonspecific particulate and microscopic garbage.

“I hear you found bloodstains in the basement.”

“Back near the furnace. Nothing much to see except a spot where the dust had been wiped up, but it gave chemical traces of blood, same type as the victim. So did this.” He opened a folder and showed Auburn a sheet of paper that had been tightly wadded and then partly smoothed out again. Besides bloodstains, it bore traces of grit and dust. “Found this in the crawl space under the back porch. He must have used it to wipe the blood off the floor.”

Auburn examined the paper. One side was blank. On the other was printed, under the logo of a firm called Arco-Net Security Limited, a standard work contract to install an electronic security system. None of the blanks had been filled in, and the paper appeared to be a photocopy of an original document.

“I didn’t see any loose papers in that basement,” said Auburn. “This must be something the killer had with him. Has anybody checked on this company?”

“Not yet. I’m still putting my report together.”

“How can I get a photocopy of this form?”

“I’ll put it in a transparent sleeve.”

Doing his own Web search, Auburn found that Arco-Net was still in business but had dropped its local franchisee three years ago. Probably the murderer had used the blank contract form to gain admittance to Ida Blanford’s house on the pretext of giving a sales pitch or preparing an estimate for an electronic security system.

Premeditated murder seemed unlikely. According to her nephew, Ida was a gutsy character. She might have put up a fight, forcing the robber to use a weapon he’d brought along merely as a threat. But once he got hold of her keys, he went straight to the safe and cleaned it out without even bothering to search for loot elsewhere in the big house. Maybe he was somebody who owed Ida Blanford money. In that case, by removing his IOU along with a bundle of cash, he’d reduced the risk that he’d be counted among the suspects.

Dale Blanford presumably wasn’t the killer, since his aunt would have recognized him in spite of her visual impairment, and the ruse about the security system would have been unnecessary. Yet Dale knew about both her safe and her weakness for security devices. And he admitted that she’d lent him money; he didn’t say he’d ever paid it back.

None of the neighbors had reported seeing any visitors or unusual activity at the house. That could mean the killer had arrived after dark. If he parked down the street and went to the back door, nobody on the street or at The Green Fish would have seen him entering the house. He evidently had something with him that had been marked with Rakovy’s name, probably a toolbox in which to carry away the loot, but that didn’t prove he was Rakovy.

Auburn found eighty-one Johnstons in the metropolitan telephone directory. He decided to assume, for the time being, that the alternative name on the tape had been chosen at random. After spending some time in Records consulting a collection of old city directories, he made a call to Pittsburgh and another to the local office of Allied Bell. That second call led to a personal visit to the phone company, which he made on foot.

The day was cloudy and breezy, cooler than yesterday. The air smelled like rain. After leaving the Allied Bell offices, Auburn returned to headquarters just long enough to prepare an application for search and arrest warrants and the necessary affidavits, and then took them across the street to the courthouse.

By eleven thirty he was back at The Green Fish, where he found the table in the window vacant just as if it had been reserved for him. Nothing much had changed. Scotty and Darla were still chanting their enigmatic antiphons and responses above the mutter of voices and the squawk of the radio speakers. The special today was codfish Creole, but the place smelled exactly the way it had yesterday.

The Blanford homicide had been a featured item on the TV news and in the morning papers. Some of the regulars obviously recognized Auburn and did double takes on seeing him back again at the same table. Yesterday he’d been a stranger, an anomaly in this milieu. By now he was becoming absorbed into it, was almost a regular himself. When a juvenile diner accidentally tipped a full glass of water onto the floor, Auburn was on the spot, helping with the mop from behind the serving counter before Darla got there.

“We’re going to have to put you on the payroll, Officer,” she said. “You going to try the codfish today? This time yesterday it was still swimming around in Chesapeake Bay.”

“I think I’ll stick with the Salisbury steak.”

“You want that with soup and salad again?”

“Just coffee today, please.”

There was nothing much to see across the street. Ida Blanford’s Victorian revival house stood as it had for decades, stodgy and aloof. Only a strand of yellow tape caught in a hedge showed that anything unusual had happened there lately. And inside The Green Fish, life went on according to the usual routine as well.

The group of East Indians came in for lunch again, followed shortly by the retiree with the smashed thumb. They sat at the same tables as yesterday, ate the same food. Then the crowd in the dining area gradually thinned out again, so that by half past two Auburn almost had the place to himself. At a few minutes before three, Patrolman Fritz Dollinger entered in plainclothes and took one of the stools at the lunch counter.

Things were already picking up at the bar when Greg Rakovy came in from the back room, tying on a short black apron. He cast a quick eye over the dining room and seemingly made a point of not noticing Auburn.

When Auburn took his check to the cash register, Scotty Casteven interrupted the daily chore of cleaning the grill to take care of him. Auburn waited until he had his change to make the pinch. “Melvin Casteven,” he said, so quietly that only Dollinger and Casteven himself could hear him, “I have a warrant for your arrest on a charge of first-degree murder. There may be other charges as well. You have the right to remain silent...”

Casteven didn’t try to bluff, he didn’t bluster, he just caved in. By the time Auburn finished reciting the familiar formula, his knees had turned to jelly and his face was the color of barley soup. Dollinger stepped into the gap in the counter, prepared to hold him up if necessary. Casteven was stout, but Dollinger was stouter.

“Hey, Darla,” said Casteven, his voice hoarse and shaky, “I need to go downtown with these men. Close the dining room. And call Kriegel’s before four fifteen and cancel that meat order.” He didn’t say anything to Rakovy.

After they left the bar and grill, Auburn looked back to see Darla staring in bewilderment through the window with the picture of the big fish while she mechanically pocketed the tip he’d left and wiped the table with a cloth.

“First we’re going upstairs to look around your place,” Auburn told Casteven. He waited to serve the search warrant until Casteven had unlocked the door to the stairs leading to the apartment over The Green Fish. The apartment was a dump, the typical living quarters of a widower who worked about sixty hours a week. Only the kitchen was more or less presentable, probably because Casteven ate all his meals down in the restaurant. They didn’t find Ida Blanford’s money.

“Okay,” said Auburn, “now let’s go back downstairs and see what’s in your freezer that you didn’t want the meat man from Kriegel’s to find tomorrow morning.”

“Hold on a minute,” said Casteven. “You can’t go poking around in there without a food-handler’s card from the Board of Health.”

“We’re going to risk it. I worked at a deli when I was in high school. I know all about freezers. And freezer bags.”

Buried under cuts of beef and pork they found a bag just like the one the divers had brought up from the river, only this one was stuffed with money. Dollinger spent the entire time it took them to get downtown counting it. There was over thirty thousand dollars, mostly in large bills. Dale Blanford would no doubt be pleased to learn that his aunt’s outstanding promissory notes were there too.

When they arrived at headquarters, they took Casteven directly to an interrogation room, euphemistically styled “Conference A,” on the second floor. At the risk of throwing the central air-conditioning out of adjustment, Auburn opened one of the big frosted glass windows, as he often did at this time of year. Dollinger stood at attention just inside the door like a sentry, even though his main function there was to serve as an official witness.

“Please make yourself comfortable, sir,” Auburn told Casteven. He was always scrupulously polite to persons under arrest. It looked like the prisoner was planning to stand mute. They didn’t need a confession to make the charges stick, but Auburn hoped to get some more details before he turned the case over to the prosecutor’s office. He’d already given Casteven the statutory warnings, but he gave them again.

“I’m going to remind you that you’re entitled to have a lawyer here before you say anything. But once you have legal representation, the city will have it too, in the form of an assistant prosecutor. And then those two lawyers will take over the case and decide your future between them.”

Casteven sat with his bulky frame huddled on the edge of his chair like a little boy caught stealing apples. His dominant emotion seemed to be shame rather than fear. But clearly he was skeptical that Auburn had any other motive than the desire to see him convicted and sentenced. And Auburn knew that nothing he could do or say would convince this man of his genuine compassion, or persuade him that he enjoyed this part of his job about as much as Casteven enjoyed scraping burnt grease off the grill.

“I’m going to put my cards on the table,” he said. “Most of them anyway. I’m sure you know that the divers brought up the gun and the gloves from the river where you threw them.”

Casteven looked as if he were going to make a last-minute effort to deny everything, but something about Auburn’s businesslike tone apparently told him it wouldn’t work.

“You don’t need to say a thing if you don’t want to,” Auburn assured him again. “Let me tell you what I think happened. Your business has been going down for years, along with all the other businesses in the neighborhood. And things only got worse when your wife died and you had to decide between struggling along without her and hiring some backup help. Getting your brother-in-law to work for you took off some of the workload, but it also cut your net income even further.”

A gentle breeze from the direction of the river stirred forms on the table and cobwebs in the corners. They could hear the piping of dozens of birds in the trees around the courthouse half a block away.

“From your apartment you had a view of Ida Blandford’s house across the street. You saw people visiting her in the evening — couples, individuals — and these obviously weren’t social visits. Probably you could see her talking to them in her front parlor. Maybe you even saw her go upstairs and take her keys out of her purse and unlock her safe—”

The look on Casteven’s face provided full confirmation of Auburn’s surmise.

“Day after day you watched that going on, and day after day you tried to figure out how to get your hands on that money. You saw that she was concerned about security, so you decided to pretend to represent a company that installs electronic burglar alarm systems.” Casteven’s eyes opened wider and he seemed to be having trouble breathing.

“You figured if she couldn’t see well enough to drive, she probably wouldn’t recognize you as the guy from the bar and grill across the street, especially since she avoided your place like a leper colony. Probably you thought if you could once get inside her house you could jam a window latch or figure out some other way to fix it so you could slip in from the back some Sunday morning while she was at church.

“According to the phone company’s records, you called her last Friday evening, and again on Monday. And Wednesday night you turned up at her place, didn’t you, by appointment? Greg Rakovy’s truck was parked on Jardine last night for hours, and it’s parked there again today. After dark it would have been easy to climb up in the back and borrow his toolbox.”

Casteven shook his head and spoke for the first time since they’d entered the room. “Hard hat. And a pair of gloves.”

Dollinger sat down and started taking notes.

“Okay, his hard hat. And you put a piece of tape over his name and wrote a fake name on it. And you put on his gloves so you wouldn’t leave fingerprints anywhere, and took along an old revolver just in case—”

“I never owned a gun in my life,” said Casteven. “And I never fired one in my life, either. It was her gun. Something I said or did when I was down in the basement must have tipped her off. Anyway she went upstairs for a minute and when she came back she was pointing this big old cannon right in my face. I freaked out because she was blind as a bat and her hands were shaking. I tried to take the gun away from her and she shot herself. That’s what happened, and even if you bring a hundred prosecutors in here, it was still an accident.”

“No, sir. A homicide that occurs during the commission of a felony offense is automatically first-degree murder. That’s how the law reads, and that’s how your arrest warrant reads. This happened around — what, eight or nine o’clock Wednesday evening?”

Evidently alarmed by what Auburn had just said, Casteven clammed up again.

“You found her purse, got her keys, and opened the safe. You probably waited until Rakovy closed up for the night before you went across to the bar and grill and got a big, resealable plastic freezer bag to stow the cash in. And later that night you moved the body and the purse to the riverbank. Your idea was obviously to conceal the fact that you, the killer, had ever been in the house.”

At the word “killer,” Casteven clamped his lips still more tightly shut.

“But then you decided to put the gun and the gloves in another freezer bag and throw them in the river. Why?”

Casteven shrugged and his eyebrows went up, but he said nothing.

“After all, the gun couldn’t be traced to you. And you could have burned the gloves. Why throw them in the river and go to the additional trouble of sealing them up together in a waterproof bag? I’ll tell you why. When you peeled the tape off Rakovy’s hard hat you saw that his name had come off on the sticky side, and you decided to frame him for the murder you hadn’t planned to commit.

“You and he obviously don’t get along. Maybe you think you’re paying him more than he’s worth, and maybe you resent the fact that he hits it off a lot better with Darla than you do. Or maybe you just could never stand the guy. But at some point between the death of Ida Blanford and the moment when you tossed that bag in the river, you decided to make it look like Greg was the killer.

“There weren’t any fingerprints on the stuff in that bag. How do you handle adhesive tape without leaving some partials somewhere? How do you take off a pair of gloves and stuff them in a plastic bag without leaving any prints on the bag?”

“I guess you might wear another pair of gloves,” said Casteven, “which you don’t have to get rid of because they don’t have blood on them.”

“But if you didn’t expect the bag to be found, why worry about fingerprints at all?”

“Wouldn’t I have been taking a pretty long chance that they’d even look for the gun in the river, let alone bring it up?”

“Not really. When Fire and Rescue dredged up that gun from the Karlowski shooting a couple of years ago, the papers made a big deal about how there are sandbars lying crosswise in the riverbed that catch debris and keep it from washing downstream until there’s been a lot of rain. It looks to me like evidence of a frameup, but it’ll be up to the prosecutor to formulate the charges.

“Although the cash we found in your freezer is evidence that you robbed Ida Blanford, I want to remind you that the charge on which you were arrested was first-degree murder. And the evidence I showed the judge to back up my application for that warrant was the scrap of paper you used to wipe up the blood from the basement floor.

“That paper was a photocopy you made of the contract for the security system you had installed seven years ago at your old house at 808 Eversole. It was just a stage prop, and you figured it would be good enough to fool a woman who was legally blind. Before you made the copy, you whited out the information that had been written in the blanks and the signatures, but you missed the serial number — it’s in red ink on the original document. When I called the home office of the security company in Pittsburgh, they identified you immediately as the person to whom that contract had been issued.”

By the time Auburn and Dollinger had booked Casteven, dispatched him to the cells, placed the stolen cash under lock and key in the evidence room, and finished up most of the paperwork, it was almost seven P.M. They headed for the canteen in the basement at double time.

The entrees of the day — or what was left of them after hours of torment in a steam table — were Cajun-style shrimp delight and Salisbury steak.

The Broadcast Centre between Wellington and Front Streets faced the vast Metro Toronto Convention Centre. It was conveniently connected to the array of underground walkways known as PATH that linked the buildings of downtown Toronto like the web of some giant spider. Beth was thankful for it on stormy winter days when she could cover the several blocks to City Hall or the Eaton Centre mall without setting foot outdoors.

The morning news was long ended by the time she returned from the fire scene. “Where’ve you been?” Glen Walker asked in a fatherly tone. He was the handsome grayhaired anchor of the morning and noon weekend shows. A few years back he’d co-anchored the nightly news until someone decided they needed a younger face.

“Coffee with Detective Constable Bates. He was down at the fire scene.”

“Learn anything more?”

“Nothing. It might have been kids playing with matches.”

“Arson?”

“That’s the preliminary suspicion, but it’s not Bates’s department.” She glanced around the newsroom. “Pretty quiet, even for a Sunday.”

“The sports department has a poker game going till the American football games start at one.” It was already nearly noon.

She poked her head in and found four of them seated around the small conference table. The ceramic Christmas tree that decorated it the previous week had been shunted aside to the top of a filing cabinet. Rich LeFavre, the weekend sports anchor, was dealing a hand of stud poker, and she could see a cluster of five-dollar bills for the ante. “We’ve got room for a fifth, Beth,” Rich called out. “Always happy to take your money.”

“Too rich for my blood,” she told him. She’d mainly wanted to see who all was in there, and was a bit surprised that Hayes Merritt was one of them. Hayes was a big deal, the station’s evening news anchor. She’d never seen him at the station on a Sunday, to say nothing of Christmas weekend.

Walker glanced up as she returned to the desk she shared in the newsroom. “No room for an extra?”

“You think I’m going to sit in on a stud game with Hayes Merritt? I don’t see you in there.”

“Afraid to take his money, Beth? He earns more than the two of us put together. Way more.”

“And he’s here on a Sunday afternoon, Boxing Day, instead of home with his wife and kids.”

“We’re all waiting. You know that. If a story breaks he’ll be on camera for the evening news.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. It was like sitting around in a hospital waiting for an elderly uncle to die. Once they got the word, the newsroom would spring into action. Until then, there was stud poker and American football.

“Want to take Foxy and go over to Eaton Centre? Find out how people are spending Boxing Day?”

“Now there’s excitement.” She thought about it and suggested instead, “I should dig out the clips of the previous victims, just in case we need them.”

“I think Merritt already has them lined up, but you can check it.”

She typed in the name of the first victim on her computer. Norma Durban. The dates sprang up on the screen: 6/10/01, 12/27/01, 12/28/01, 12/29/01, and every day into the new year. Then there were a few skips that gradually lengthened into weeks, then months. December 27th would have been the day the body parts were identified through fingerprints. That had been Beth’s first Christmas in the city and she remembered the story all too well.

But she hadn’t been here yet on June 10th of that year and she wondered how the dead girl had made the news that day. She brought up the tape and saw a familiar face. It was Constable Bates, leading three young ladies into the Dundas Street police station during a brief crackdown on women cavorting topless in the City Hall fountain. Their names were given and the middle one, her top suitably covered for television, was Norma Durban. The topless movement had been short-lived in downtown Toronto, more or less settled by the establishment of a “clothing optional beach” at Hanlon’s Point on the west side of the Toronto Islands, near the small island airport. But Beth didn’t remember any mention of Norma Durban’s involvement in it.

She picked up the phone and dialed the cell phone number Bates had given her. “This is Beth,” she said when he answered. “I wanted to ask you—”

He cut her off. “I’m on my way to your place right now. I’ll be there in five minutes.” His voice was gruff, all business, and she wondered what was up.

From the sports department came the sound of the American football game, and Beth knew without checking her watch that it must be one o’clock. The poker game would be put aside now for football, while they all waited for the news everyone expected.

As soon as Bates came through the station door she asked, “Has there been another killing?”

“I hope not. I’m here about that yacht fire you were covering.”

It had almost slipped from her mind. “What about it?”

He slipped off his topcoat and draped it over a chair. “The arson investigators found something, a book of matches from this station.” He slipped a photograph out of an envelope he was carrying.

She stared at a charred matchbook with the station’s call letters clearly visible. “I never saw these and I’ve been here over three years. We don’t give out matches any more. Hardly any businesses do, with the smoking bans.”

“Who would know about them?”

She thought of the men in the other room. “Hayes Merritt, I suppose. He’s been here longer than me. I’ll get him.”

“He’s here on a Sunday?”

“It’s Boxing Day,” she reminded him, as if he’d forgotten. “I’ll get Hayes for you.”

The weeknight news anchor left the TV set with some reluctance and followed her out to the newsroom. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?”

Bates showed him the photo. “The arson boys found this at the scene of the yacht fire this morning.”

Hayes Merritt grunted. “We haven’t had any of those around for five years, maybe longer.”

“The arsonist might have dropped it, assuming it would be destroyed in the fire.”

“Anyone might have dropped it. Believe me, Sergeant, we’re not so desperate for news that we go around starting fires.”

“By the time I got there the fire was out anyway,” Beth said. “All we had was a talking head of me standing there.”

Bates was still studying the picture. “No chance there’s a box of these still around the station?”

“Not that I’ve seen in years.” He headed back to the sports department.

Sergeant Bates smiled as he heard the sounds from the next room. “What are they doing, watching American football?”

Beth shrugged. “I guess so.” Then she remembered her reason for phoning Bates. She showed him the film clip of the first Boxing Day victim after he’d arrested her.

“Yeah, I remember her. She told us at the time she’d come here to attend the university. It wasn’t till after she was killed that we found out she was a runaway, if you can call a nineteen year old a runaway. Legally we couldn’t force her to return to Thunder Bay.”

“What about these other girls?”

“They were legitimate students. It was just a crazy college stunt. Durban hung around with them for a while but never attended classes.”

“She must have been living somewhere, perhaps with her killer.”

“That’s what we thought, but we could never prove it. Then after the second killing we decided it wasn’t a sex thing at all. Larry Amsterdam was a two-bit hoodlum who served a year in prison for assault and robbery. You’ve probably got a tape of that too somewhere. I was in on the arrest.”

“What about last year’s victim? Wasn’t he a gay activist?”

“Earl Sydney? Nice guy. He had a gift shop down on Queens Quay and was president of the small business council. He wasn’t that much of an activist, though.”

“Was he living with someone?”

“No, he lived alone. All three of the victims did, near as we can tell.”

“Did you ever arrest him?”

Bates was puzzled by her question. “No. Why do you ask?”

“I hadn’t realized the first two victims were people you’d arrested. Could there be a pattern there?”

He laughed at the thought. “What sort of pattern would that be?”

Beth shrugged. “Enemies of society, in the eyes of the killer. A girl who went topless, an ex-convict, a gay man.”

But Bates wasn’t buying it. “Someone like that wouldn’t wait a year between victims.”

“There could be a copy-cat killer with his own motives.”

“All three were the work of the same killer. We never released details of the dismemberments, but they were all done the same way.”

A cheer went up in the sports department and Beth said, “Maybe we’ve seen the end of it. Maybe there’ll be no Boxing Day killer this year. Here it is after one o’clock and nothing’s happened yet.”

Sergeant Bates grunted and prepared to leave. “How late are you working today?”

“Till four — unless a big story breaks. I started at seven this morning.”

“Suppose I come by at four to pick you up.”

“Pick me up? I have my own car.”

“I know. Maybe we could have a drink for the holidays.”

Those words were about the last thing she expected to hear from Matt Bates. They’d had a friendly enough relationship over the past three years, but it was a business relationship only — the press and the police. Now, suddenly, he seemed to be inviting her out on a date.

“I... I don’t know.”

“Sure, why not?”

“All right,” she agreed. “There’s a little place in the Distillery District that’ll be open today.” She wrote down the address for him.

“Great! I’ll see you there at four.” He paused at the newsroom door. “If you go out on an assignment this afternoon, call me. Okay?”

“What?” she asked, not certain she’d heard correctly. But by that time he was gone.

Beth strolled into the sports department to watch the game. The station was showing an old Christmas movie and she couldn’t blame them for choosing football instead. Walker and Merritt and LeFavre were all grouped around the TV monitor tuned to the Buffalo station, and she saw that Foxy o’dwyer had joined them. All seemed convinced that nothing was going to happen this year. The killings were over.

She remembered her questions to Bates about the third victim and decided to check the files. It would have been done a year ago, of course, and surely any arrest would have been noted. There was only one file film for Earl Sydney, in the spring of 2003, addressing a luncheon of the small business council. Seeing it again, she remembered that the station had run it at the time of his murder. She shut off the monitor and went back to the football game.

It was nearly three o’clock when Glen Walker took a call and told her, “Beth, there’s a truck skidded and overturned on the QEW in Mississauga, just past the Dixie Road exit. Take Foxy along and get some footage for six o’clock.”

O’Dwyer grumbled and got to his feet. “I’d rather watch the end of the game. Come on, Beth. We can take the van.”

She remembered her four o’clock date with Matt Bates. He’d said to phone him if she went out on assignment, but she figured she’d be back in time. “I’ve got an appointment after work. I’d better take my own car.”

She followed O’Dwyer out of the Broadcast Centre parking lot, in the shadow of CN Tower, and onto the Gardiner Expressway, which became Queen Elizabeth Way. The expressway was noted for its heavy traffic, bound for Hamilton, Buffalo, and Niagara Falls, but on Boxing Day it was surprisingly light. They encountered only minor delays on the way to the accident. The sunny day had turned cloudy, though, and as their vehicles approached the overturned truck a light snow was falling. O’Dwyer raised the tower of their transmitter and Beth checked her makeup in the car mirror. Then she got the clip-on mike from the truck and found a likely police officer to interview. The driver of the truck and been taken to the hospital in an ambulance but his injuries did not appear severe.

Even on a slow news day the story didn’t rate more than a few minutes. She thanked the officer and gave the mike back to Foxy. Her car was parked just behind the news van and as she opened the door he called to her. “Looks like your tire’s flat, Beth.”

Indeed it was. She cursed silently and reached for her cell phone. “I suppose most of the garages are closed today too.”

“Do you have a spare?”

“Sure, but I’m not up to changing it myself in this weather.”

He smiled at her. “I can do it. Wait in the van, out of the cold.”

“Thanks, Foxy. You’re a doll.”

He followed her into the van. “I’ll need the key to your trunk.”

She turned to hand it to him and a stark white odor seemed to blot out her vision. She had a fleeting memory of a childhood hospital stay, and then nothing.

Not thinking I was too old for this, because I’d never been young enough; not thinking I should have had second thoughts about coming to look for the body with the hurricane hovering just off the North Carolina shore, because the damn thing must have changed direction.

And not thinking about who might have shot me, as much as what to do about it.

Not that it was much of a wound — just a groove in the skin below the shoulder, but it stung and kept me angry. Angry enough to want to do something about it.

So, that’s what occupied my thoughts until the storm passed and left me in a soft but persisting rain.

Which, in the relative calm, is when I got out my cell and made two calls.

The first, as I trudged back toward the highway, to the police, though I knew I wouldn’t be a high priority on their list of things-to-do-when-a-hurricane-hits.

And then, when I was finally sitting in my rented Explorer, which had been rolled off the road and into a ditch, I made the second, to Scotty McKey.

Who’d started it all. Two days ago, at the Fort Bragg BOQ.

DiMarco’s Grocery, along the first floor of a two-story wooden building painted pale blue, sat at the corner of Hampson and Burdette Streets. The smile on Sal DiMarco’s face disappeared when Beau told him what had happened. Sixty-six years old, five seven, a hundred and forty pounds, with thick gray hair and a matching mustache, Sal’s eyes teared up and he had to take a seat.

Beau leaned against the counter and accepted a Coke from Sal’s son Joe, who was missing both hands and used old fashioned metal hooks, instead of prosthetic hands.

“Was a firefighter,” Joe explained. “Lost both hands in a fire back in ’61. In the French Quarter, thought we’d lose an entire block, but only lost two houses and two hands.”

Joe delivered Lily’s groceries. His last delivery was three days earlier. Lily would call in her order and he’d deliver it, but never went inside. Lily always met him on the back porch, always paid with cash, and always carried her own stuff in from the porch.

“Do you know what drugstore she used?” Beau chided himself for not copying the names of any pharmacy from the prescriptions in Lily’s bathroom cabinet.

“Ours.” Joe explained they had a pharmacist in the back. “I offered to carry the stuff in every time, but she never let me. Rich people are sometimes odd. She was very quiet, never really looked me in the eye, but I liked her.” Joe, in his late forties, stood six three, two-eighty, balding, lifted his apron with the hook on his right hand and wiped tears from his eyes.

“You’re from Homicide?”

Beau nodded, taking another sip of Coke.

“She was murdered?”

Beau nodded again.

“This is horrible,” he said. “Absolutely horrible.”

“How long was Lily a customer?”

Sal answered for his son. “Forty years. More. She used to come in till her son was killed in Vietnam. We been deliverin’ ever since.”

As Beau jotted the DiMarcos’ contact information in his notes, Sal leaned on the counter and asked, “Did Lily suffer?”

Beau gave him the stare, the expressionless stare of his ancestors, those lean plains warriors who said little and showed no emotion in their faces, ever, even when dying at the hands of the white man.

The old man’s eyes became wet again.

Beau thanked them for the Coke and left his business card, in case they heard anything. He spent the next four hours in a futile canvass of Hampson and the side streets around the house with the twenty-one steps.

Surveying the congested disorder of vehicles and pedestrians in front of the Book Cadillac Hotel, James O’Neill admired the pale, spring sunshine slanting down into the street, warming and softening the granite of the tall buildings.

The flash of a pretty ankle caught his eye as a flapper in a fur coat clambered into a cab, dropping her purse on the sidewalk in the process. Too late he rushed forward. The cab nosed into traffic as a boy pounced, scooped up the purse, and was about to make off with it.

“Pardon me, lad.” O’Neill grabbed the young thief’s collar and relieved him of the purse. “Would you care to show me your name on that purse?”

Grimacing with the effort, the boy squirmed until he broke free, then dove into the river of black-bodied cars tearing through the square.

For an instant, O’Neill considered giving chase, then decided it was already a lost cause. From an island in the center of the boiling, churning river of traffic, the blue-capped boy made a rude gesture at him, then continued nimbly dodging automobiles until he reached the safety of the other side of the street and disappeared.

O’Neill loosened the purse’s drawstrings. Inside was a wad of bills, a flask, and a derringer, but nothing identifying the owner. He pulled the purse closed.

A doorman in uniform stood stonily at attention in front of the revolving glass door of the hotel, his eyes alert, taking in the scene. O’Neill approached. The man’s alarmed gaze skittered away from the bulge of a gun in O’Neill’s pocket.

“Might you know that young lady, sir?” O’Neill asked.

Startled at being spoken to, the doorman eyed him suspiciously, not recognizing him and trying to figure out where he fit in. The doorman’s gaze flitted from sidewalk to street then back again, watching for trouble.

O’Neill waited patiently, letting the man take his time.

Finally, the doorman glanced over his shoulder at the hotel one last time, screwed his face up with the effort of coming to a decision, then blasted an answer as if it were a painful belch, “Sure I know. Everyone knows her. That was Marilyn.”

“Marilyn Massie?” O’Neill’s pulse quickened at this bit of luck. That explained the purse’s contents. “And might you happen to know where I could find her?”

Before he could reply, two dapper men emerged from the hotel and gestured for a cab. Out of the corner of his eye, O’Neill sized up the men, members of the Purple Gang emerging from their headquarters in the hotel. Young, sleek, arrogant. Too arrogant, fortunately, to take notice of him.

A whistle brought a shiny new Packard to the curb. The doorman rushed to help the men climb in. The car leapt out into traffic and the doorman returned. “Big tippers,” he said disparagingly, displaying the nickel in his palm before pocketing it. Back at his station at the door, a little less wary, the doorman asked, “Who wants to know about Marilyn?”

Shrugging nonchalantly, O’Neill held up a five dollar bill. “She dropped her purse. Call me a good Samaritan. I want to return it to her.” He raised the purse and gave it a shake for emphasis with a sheepish grin.

A smile tweaked the doorman’s unexpressive mouth. “She probably went to the club. That’s where she spends most of her evenings if she’s not here.”

“The club?” O’Neill asked, not sure which of the Purples’ blind pigs he meant.

The man’s eyes widened slightly in surprise, and his glance shifted again to the concealed gun. “You new to Detroit?”

O’Neill nodded.

The doorman looked away and muttered under his breath as if he were a spy relaying a password, “The Kibbutzer Club. On Woodward, near Columbia. Rap three times.”

O’Neill shook the man’s hand, slipping the five spot to him. “Appreciate it.”

Twenty minutes later, I’d washed my face, run a razor over a three-day growth of beard, combed my hair, and put on nearly clean slacks and a sweater. I almost felt human again, and I’d gotten rid of the worst of the whiskey smell.

Unfortunately, I had also begun to sober up, and with returning mental sharpness came all-too-familiar pains in both legs. Alcohol blunted my senses better than drugs; that’s why I drank as much and as often as possible. I only stopped when I had to.

Finally I limped back out to the family room. Bob leaped up when he saw me, running one hand quickly across his nearly shaved head and pulling his suit jacket straight.

“Let me guess,” I said, really studying him for the first time. His too-short hair and well-developed muscles screamed military. “You just got out of the service and decided to pay your sister a visit. She suggested Davy might be able to find you a job.”

He gaped. “Did you talk to Cree?”

Slowly I settled into one of the wingback chairs, folded my hands across my belly, and stretched out both legs; they hurt less that way.

I said: “Why else would an ex-Marine come to Philadelphia, if not to see your sister and her fiancé? You’re dressed up — I assume for a job interview — though I’d lose the baseball cap next time. But the real question,” I said, warming to the subject, “is why Davy Hunt sent you here.”

Bob frowned, brow furrowing. “He said he trusted your opinion. If you think I’m good enough, he’ll take me on.”

“In what capacity?”

“Bodyguard.”

I raised my eyebrows slightly. “Davy needs a bodyguard?”

“My sister thinks so.”

After their problem with blackmailers, I understood Cree’s concern. Davy’s net worth ran somewhere upwards of fifty million dollars — more than enough to make him a target for opportunists.

I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything, the doorbell rang again. From outside came faint childish giggles.

“You can start by taking care of those kids,” I said to Bob. “Ask them not to bother me again.”

“Sir!” Like a panther, he sprang to the door and threw it open. Ten-year-old boys scattered, screaming, as he gave chase. I heard Bob shouting something about “whooping hides” if they bothered me again, then several doors slammed shut.

When he returned, he was grinning. “I love kids,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll bother you again, sir. At least, not for a few days.”

“Thanks.” Maybe bodyguards had their uses.

“Then you’ll give me a try?”

I stared at him blankly. “I don’t follow you.”

“Sir, I’m supposed to be your bodyguard for the next few days. You can kick the tires. Try me out. Make sure I’m everything I ought to be to keep David safe.”

“I don’t need a bodyguard. I don’t want a bodyguard. I leave my apartment once or twice a month at most!”

“David knew you’d say that.” His brow furrowed. “He told me to tell you — beg your pardon, sir — to shut up and pitch in.”

Just like Davy to be blunt with me. Maybe I did object too much. Maybe it did take a kick in the pants to get me moving. But did I really need a bodyguard?

It wasn’t for me, though. It was for Davy. If he valued my opinion this much... well, I needed to get him a Christmas present anyway. This would be it, as I would let him know the next time I saw him!

“Very well.” I motioned unhappily with one hand. I’d need rent money soon, anyway. “You can start bodyguarding in the morning. It’s time I ran some errands, anyway.”

Rent money meant a trip to Atlantic City and the casinos. Sometimes having a trick memory helped, like when I needed to know the number of face cards played from an eight-deck blackjack shoe.

“It’ll be over sooner if I start tonight, sir.”

“‘Over sooner’?” I chuckled. “Bob, you sound like you don’t want to babysit a seedy drunken cripple!”

“Sir!” He looked alarmed. “I never said that!”

“Then you do want to babysit a seedy drunken cripple?”

“That’s a fool’s argument, sir.” He shrugged with wry humor. “You know I can’t win. I just thought you’d want me out by Christmas Day.”

“I don’t care. Start when you want. End when you want. It’s all the same.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Do you have a place to sleep?”

“Uh... not yet. I was hoping to bunk here.”

It figured. Why did I suddenly feel like Oscar Madison from The Odd Couple, with an eager-beaver Felix about to move in?

“There’s only one bed,” I said, “and I’m usually passed out in it.”

“The sofa is fine — after sleeping in a humvee for six months, pretty much anything will do. Just give me a blanket and I’ll be out like a log.”

“There’s one in the linen closet.” I jerked my head toward the back of the apartment. “And an extra pillow on the top shelf.”

Using my walking stick, I levered myself unsteadily to my feet. My legs ached again. Slowly I limped toward my bedroom, thoughts of Jack Daniel’s and sweet oblivion dancing in my head.

The Huntington Hotel at Taylor and Mason on North Beach is small and luxurious. The service is friendly and attentive and the better rooms four hundred dollars a night and up so Nic supposed this fellow Cranston was no piker.

The desk called Cranston’s room and said he would be right down. Nic was glancing through a few listings of professional interest on the American Exchange in the Wall Street Journal in the lobby when a voice called his name.

The man approaching was possibly his age or maybe a handful of years younger. He was slightly built and had sparse, sandy hair and large-lensed glasses with clear plastic rims. He wore a lime green linen Polo shirt and light beige slacks with white canvas loafers. He had an ingenuous air, as if he didn’t come to the big city very often.

The two confirmed one another’s identity. Cedric Cranston had a shy smile and gave the impression of a friendly, easygoing nature. His voice was light and he had a Midwestern accent. He waved to an arrangement of leather armchairs around a knurled wood table. “Shall we sit? My room’s very comfortable, but it’s more spacious down here.”

They did so and sat at right angles to each other. “We have well over an hour — plenty of time to get to the auction,” Cranston said.

“The auction?” Nic questioned.

He looked concerned. “Yes, surely Mr. Sheraton explained the purpose of my request to your company? I want someone—”

“I understand that,” Nic said, “but I didn’t realize that the auction was today. I thought we were merely going to talk about what you have in mind, devise a bidding strategy, and agree on—”

“Ah!” he said, looking alarmed. “Perhaps I didn’t explain myself clearly to Mr. Sheraton. No, the auction is today at eleven A.M.” He examined Nic’s face anxiously. “It’s really very simple. I can tell you in a few minutes what I want. We will take a taxi and be at the auction rooms in half an hour. Plenty of time, you see.” A thought struck him. “Do you have a lot of preparing to do? I’m sorry, I know nothing about auctions and I didn’t realize—”

“No, no, it’s all right. I can handle it this way.”

Nic felt protective toward him — he had a helplessness about him and so obviously had an acute sensitivity about being the neophyte on the verge of getting tossed into the threatening arena of the auction.

“Are you sure?” He pushed his glasses farther up on his nose. “The auction is today though, and it’s very important to me to—”

“It’s okay, really. Do you have a catalog?”

“Yes, right here.” Cedric Cranston pulled one from his pocket and handed it to Nic.

“First,” Nic said, “can you tell me what you have in mind? What are you looking for? Some particular lot, one of the better buys...?”

“I want to buy one wine.”

“One lot?”

“No, I—”

“One case?”

“No, one bottle.”

“One bottle,” Nic repeated weakly. “Well, okay, any bottle in particular?”

“Oh yes, very definitely. I want a bottle of Leoville-Barton Bordeaux, 1959.”

Nic felt a slight quickening of the pulse. The day might be an interesting one after all. On its way to the Atlantic Ocean, the Gironde River runs through France, past vineyards that produce excellent red wines. Rich in history, this region has been inspiring minds and enlivening bodies with its products for more than a thousand years.

At the northern end of this string of vineyards are those clustered around the village of St. Julien, where one of the outstanding chateaux is that of Leoville-Barton. The wines are world renowned, and their silkiness of body, combined with an unusually attractive bouquet, has put them in great demand. As Nic’s mind rapidly recalled this information, an obvious question arose.

“Mind telling me why that particular wine?”

Cedric Cranston smiled apologetically. “I don’t suppose it’s the kind of reason that would make much sense to anybody else.” His expression suggested that he considered that explanation sufficient to answer Nic’s question.

Nic felt only a frustration that the response told him nothing. He was about to press the point, but instead he asked, “You’ve looked at the catalog, have you?”

“Yes, certainly.” He nodded vigorously.

“The Leoville is one of the items to be auctioned, I take it?”

“Of course.” He sounded aggrieved. “I wouldn’t bring you here for nothing. No, no,” he went on, “one bottle of the wine is in the catalog and I want to buy it.”

“I haven’t had a chance to check what the listing on a Leoville of that vintage is currently,” Nic said, “but I would guess it will be close to two thousand dollars.”

Nic waited for him to throw up his hands in horror. Instead, Cranston said placidly, “That would be good if I could get it for that price.”

“Do you have a limit on the bidding?”

“No limit,” he said so promptly that it was clear he had thought about this at length.

“If you don’t have a limit, why do you need me?” Nic asked. The client was paying the fee and it was really no concern of Nic’s, but he was consumed with curiosity. Cedric Cranston didn’t appear to take offense in any way. Behind the big lenses, his eyes seemed to grow bigger and rounder.

“I don’t know the ropes. All that tapping the side of the nose, holding a hand against the cheek, pulling an earlobe — I don’t know all those signals to the auctioneer or what they mean.”

“Not likely to be any of that here,” Nic said. “You’ve seen too many movies about auctioning paintings worth twenty million or more.”

“What about those paddles they wave?”

“The bidders here won’t use paddles; they’ll use the catalog. A discreet wave of it will mean moving up to the next price level. You may see only a flicker of the program if someone wants to maintain a low profile.”

“I don’t know those levels either.” He was determined to find reasons to have Nic bid for him, that was obvious. Nic still wondered why.

“Maybe it will be a hundred dollars a jump, sometimes it’s fifty,” Nic told him, “for a price around this mark.”

Cranston nodded eagerly.

“Do you have any reason to believe that someone will be bidding against you?” Nic asked. “Someone who will push the price up?”

“No,” he said, then he added, “Well, not necessarily.” He didn’t attempt to elaborate and didn’t appear to be about to do so.

Oh Roger, Nic thought, what have you dropped me into here?

“I really want that wine,” Cranston said suddenly. He had raised his voice and, realizing it, glanced around nervously in case he had been overheard. No one was anywhere near them. The desk was on the other side of the lobby, and the young man and the young woman behind it were well out of earshot.

“Listen,” he said, in a lower tone, “the difference between what you can get it for and, say, three thousand dollars — I’m willing to give you half of it as a bonus.”

Nic was not mercenary, he often told himself, but that was a tempting offer. On the other hand, Cedric Cranston had no way of knowing it, but dangling a bonus of that amount didn’t make any difference to the effort Nic would make to buy it for him. He was the client and Nic would do his utmost to satisfy him. During his career to date, brief as it was, there had been numerous temptations to make money from wines illegally. He had resisted all of them. He didn’t consider it as being particularly honorable; his parents had instilled an honesty and integrity into his upbringing and he saw that as the way to live. Money was nice to have, but his tastes were not extreme, and a life of luxury obtained through bribery and corruption did not appeal to him.

Still, this whole affair was so extraordinary that he wondered what forces were being exerted that he knew nothing about. There was a certain fascination in solving the puzzle and he was set on doing just that.

Anyway, what did he have to lose? Nothing. He was here to do a job and do it to the best of his ability. This was certainly an assignment that was intriguing in the extreme. He didn’t understand it and he wanted to. He still had plenty to learn in the wine business and undeniable factors seemed to be at work here that he had never encountered before.

After school, he went to the basketball court.

He didn’t see Papa Smurf, Dilbert, or Niveda, but that didn’t matter — other students watched, and they were like vidcams attached to Papa Smurf.

Linc took out his cell, thumbed Detective Donaldson’s number, and got Donaldson’s voice mail, “I’m away from my desk right now, please leave a message,” but Linc didn’t leave a message.

He put his cell away and looked around. Snow fell. Snowflakes had always fascinated Madmaxx. “How can every one be different, Linc? In the whole history of the world, in every snowfall, every flake was different, an endless variety of them going back millions of years. And if you look at grains of sand on a beach you see the same thing. Each one is different.”

Linc walked to the hoop and shimmied the pole.

A change came over the schoolyard, the same thing that happened to the hair on a cat’s back when a dog got too close. He knew he didn’t have much time if he wanted to take those shoes back to Madmaxx’s mother. Mrs. Sameer would want those shoes. He was good at shimmying poles and reached the top a few seconds later.

He inspected the shoes for blood because wouldn’t there have to be blood? But he saw no blood — the shoes were clean, too clean. Maytagged thoroughly. Their yellow fabric looked faded, the blue and red Fila logo blanched, and the laces white. Papa Smurf, thinking like a cop. Mr. Guthrie, taking science class one step further. X plus Y equals Z, but without proof, where did that leave him?

Didn’t matter.

The jackals spilled through the chain-link gate like Russian soldiers over German lines, yanked him from the hoop, and then it was, “Leave the shoes alone,” and a succession of kicks and punches that left him curled like the last of a species on the verge of extinction.

He lay there for a long time. He tasted blood. He looked at the shoes as they dangled in the wind. Maybe instead of Papa Smurf burning, he would be the one to burn. Another young black man, dead in the suburbs. But so much more — a young man who was going to be the next Hendrix, the next B. B. King, who understood the blues the way a physicist understood nature, not just another dead black man, but a whole universe of thought, feeling, and memory.

Like Madmaxx.

Now with his yellow Fila high-tops drooping from the rusted orange basketball hoop, obscene, a pair of lemony gonads, as good as parading Madmaxx’s head on a stake.

This day starts off like so many others: up whenever she feels like it, for she hates having to get up at a particular time. She had grown up in a trailer in a place outside Steamboat Springs — laughingly called a park, though the scrub grass never grew more than three or four inches, and the wind whistling at night through the cracks in the sheet metal would sometimes keep her up at night, trembling in her small bed. Living there meant getting up at six twenty-five A.M. Monday through Friday to catch the bus, which meant walking down a dirt road for nearly a half mile. Saturdays and Sundays meant a whole ten or fifteen minutes more of sleep; there were always chores to do and sunlight was wasting, as her mom would tell her, coughing and wheezing after another three-pack-a-day habit burned through.

So today, she gets up at 8:11 A.M. for no particular reason, dresses in sweatpants and sweatshirt, and goes out to the small yard behind the cottage to start splitting wood. It’s a cool morning in late May, and though there’s no reason to be cutting wood — the cottage has a nice little oil furnace and the nights aren’t cold enough anymore to start a fire in the woodstove — she still loves the exercise. She buys the wood in eighteen-inch-long chunks, and loves the sound of the axe whistling into the wood, the solid chunk when it lands, and the satisfying crack when the wood splits open. The yard, with shrubbery on two sides, is hidden from prying neighbors, and at the rear is a small stream called the Wonalancet. She breathes hard as she splits wood, and when she’s done she goes back in and eats breakfast and showers up. As she dresses, she wonders if this will be the day when the whispers start up again.

It was a pretty house with a nice porch along the front and big white windows along one side of the door. I looked in while Miss Ascot rang the bell. The woman was on the telephone. I leaned against the window and listened.

“That must be the social worker now, Edna. I’ve got to go. Yes, I’m a little nervous, but lots of people do it. So I’m willing to take a chance.”

Miss Ascot put her finger on the button that rang the chimes again. They sounded nice. I like chimes.

“Yes, I’ll call you later and give you the word,” she laughed. “I’ll be worse off than she is if I have to spend another day with the children and no help. Bye, Edna.” She put the telephone down and came toward the door. I thought she was the prettiest lady I had ever seen.

“Miss Ascot. Come in.” She smiled and opened the screen door. She hadn’t looked at me. It almost seemed as though she kept her eyes away on purpose. Like she was afraid to look.

“This is Julia, Mrs. Kent. Julia, this is Mrs. Kent and she will be your new mistress. I’m sure that you and she will get along just fine. Particularly if you try your best to do everything Mrs. Kent tells you.”

I saw it then — in the corner of the living room. It was a big one, but its glass face was dark. I walked over to it and put my hand on its shiny wooden top.

“Julia!” Mrs. Ascot’s voice followed me. “Mrs. Kent was talking to you.” She lowered her voice a little, almost as though I couldn’t hear if she spoke below a shout. “She loves television. We got one at the institute and she did nothing else from morning to night but sit in front of it. We found we just had to be very firm. Outside of that one little fault I’m sure you’ll find Julia an excellent worker.”

My hand strayed across the cabinet, down toward the knobs. It was real mahogany.

“Yes, I’m sure I shall.” Mrs. Kent made her voice sound like Miss Ascot’s. “You said anyone I got would be — well, we understand. Does she have any peculiar habits?”

Miss Ascot’s voice sounded like ice cream tasted. “Julia is really quite bright, Mrs. Kent. We’re awfully pleased with her progress at the institute. She has been a star pupil. If anything goes wrong, you can reach me at this number. Now, perhaps, you’d like her to meet the children and then we’ll show her to her room.”

They walked off toward a big wide door that opened on a garden and I reached out my hand. I had carefully studied the knobs. I turned the one marked volume way down. Perhaps if they couldn’t hear...

It was cartoons. Crazy Cat. One I’d never seen. But Miss Ascot’s voice, followed by Miss Ascot, came across the room. She made the set black and she said, “Julia, you and Mrs. Kent will make arrangements about your leisure time. Until you have a schedule, you are not to watch TV. Now then, these are the children.” They were brown and strong-looking. Their names were Michael, the biggest; Gladys, next; and Frederick, the baby. They all had round blue eyes. Their mother’s eyes were brown. I wondered about their round blue eyes.

Mrs. Kent told the children to run along and then she took us up the back stairs. We went into a pretty little room with a low, slanted ceiling on the third floor. It was pink and the curtains were flowered. The bedspread was flowered, too. It matched the curtains.

“Thank you, Mrs. Kent.” I smiled at her. “It’s a very pretty room. I like it.”

She smiled back. Her eyes, as I said were brown, and her hair was red. It was long and pulled back with a jewelled clip around it. It hung down, below the clip. Her face was shaped like a heart and her mouth was red, too. She was so very pretty, I thought. I was going to like her very much.

Miss Ascot set my suitcase down. “You unpack, Julia,” she said, “and then come down and I’ll say good-bye to you.”

I was looking in the neat, clean dresser drawers when they shut the door. The drawers had flowered wall paper covering their bottoms.

“It’s just that she’s a bit childlike. An injury to her brain when she was young. We’ve trained her and are prepared to vouch for her. She is perfectly capable of earning her living. But it’s people like yourself, who are willing to take the Julias into their homes, who help the most. Home-life is what they need.”

Mrs. Kent answered but they were so far away by then that I couldn’t hear them.

I started to put my things in separate drawers, but they looked so lonesome that I put them all in one drawer like I did at the institute. Then I went downstairs.

There was a man with Mrs. Kent and Miss Ascot. He was a big man with grey and black hair that waved on his head and round blue eyes. He looked like if you poked him the air would come out.

“This is Mr. Kent, Julia,” said Miss Ascot and he shook my hand. His hand was damp. I wiped mine on the side of my skirt. I tried not to let anyone see, but he saw me. I knew because his big round eyes flattened out, just for a minute, to long slits.

“Now, Julia,” Miss Ascot put out her hand. Her hand was dry and kind of rough. It was square, like Miss Ascot. It was an easy hand to shake. “I explained about your salary and your afternoon off. Remember, you’re to be back by nine on your afternoon off.”

I nodded. She had told me a dozen times. I sometimes thought Miss Ascot was a little simple, the way she kept repeating things.

They all said good-bye then and I watched Miss Ascot disappear through the door, heard her go down the steps. I looked at the clock. Almost four. Time for Your Movie Theatre. I looked hopefully at the television set, but its face was blank.

Mrs. Kent gave a nervous little laugh. “Good heavens,” she said, “it’s almost four. I suppose we had better think about dinner, Julia.”

Mr. Kent yawned and started for the stairs. “Guess I’ll catch forty winks. Call me when dinner’s ready.”

Mrs. Kent took me to the kitchen. “Is Mr. Kent out of work?” I asked when she had given me potatoes to peel.

She looked up, startled. “Out of work? Oh — because he’s home in the daytime?” She laughed. She was such a pretty lady. “Paul is a newspaperman. He works at night. He’s what you call a reviewer. That is, he tells people whether a picture or a play or a TV show is good.”

I looked with pleasure on my nicely peeled potatoes. “But how does he know?”

She sounded like she was trying not to laugh. “He gives the readers his opinion.”

I started to ask if he got paid for it, but I looked around the shiny kitchen and decided he must. I made a note in my head to ask him about it. That was the kind of job I’d like. Watching television — and getting paid for it.

Dinner went all right and we got the children to bed. Mrs. Kent sighed then and walked heavily down the stairs. I followed her.

“Julia, you can go to bed now if you like. Mr. Kent went to the theatre this evening and I’m going to turn in early myself. I’m dead.”

I wanted to ask if I could watch the Buzzy Bisby Show, but I was afraid to — on the first night — so I went up to the third floor.

I listened carefully and when Mrs. Kent had gone to bed I sneaked back down. Keeping the volume low I watched clear through Steve Allen. It was wonderful!

I found this method worked very well. I heard Mrs. Kent tell Miss Ascot on the phone that I was very willing. “No, she hasn’t pestered me about the TV at all. She said Howdy Doody was her favorite program and the children usually watch it anyway so she has permission to see that. So all things considered, everything is fine.”

Just fine. I knew I was going to like it there. No one paid much attention to me, except Mrs. Kent. And every night — the television.

But then Mr. Kent began to stay home every evening.

He stayed home in the living room. He had bottles of things in there and he lay on the sofa and drank from them. He never even watched the television at all.

I stood it for three nights. Then I went down. I wore my best dress like a party and I brushed my hair very carefully. It is pretty hair when it’s brushed. It looks like yellow cotton candy.

Mr. Kent was lying on the sofa, his eyes shut. He hadn’t shaved. His face looked dark and scratchy. He was breathing hard. A glass was on the floor beside him.

“Mr. Kent.”

He opened his eyes. He had to look for me before he saw me.

“If it wouldn’t annoy you, Mr. Kent, could I turn on the set? I’ll keep it low and not bother you at all.”

“Good God,” he said, rubbing a hand across his eyes. “Get the hell out of here. Can’t a man have a little peace in his own home?”

I looked at the set. It was a shame. Nobody enjoying it. Nobody at all. I turned to go.

“Just a minute.” He sat up and his round eyes looked glittery. “Maybe you can stay. Nobody else will keep me company. She goes up to her chaste and virginal bed.” He swallowed the rest of the drink in his glass. “Just because a man gets fired — hell, it was no job anyway. The novel, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll write the novel. Sit down, Julia. Here — have a drink.”

I looked at the bottle. The brown stuff in it did not look as though it would taste good. But, perhaps if I went along with him, he would turn the set on.

He poured a drink for me. I was right. It did not taste good but I drank it. He was talking about a lot of things I didn’t understand like “cold-hearted bitch” and “nobody realizes that I’ve got talent.” During this time he had two more drinks and I began to get nervous. It was almost time for Steve Allen. We might miss it.

“Come here, Julia,” he said suddenly, patting the sofa cushion beside him. I put my glass down and went over. My head felt funny.

I stood next to him and he pulled me down beside him. “You may be sub-normal, but you’ve got an above-average shape.” He put his arm around my shoulders. “What do you think about, Julia? What do you think of us?”

I found his arm was heavy. I couldn’t sit up straight so I leaned back and he moved closer.

“I’m happy here, Mr. Kent. This is the first time I’ve lived in a home. Mrs. Kent is good to me.”

His round face floated over mine. “Mrs. Kent is good to nobody. Not unless they’ve got something she wants. Then she’s as sweet as honey. You wouldn’t be that way, would you, Julia?”

His other arm moved on my shoulder, down.

“Mr. Kent.” I tried to sit up.

“What do you want, Julia?”

“Mr. Kent. The television?”

“Sure,” he said. “In a minute.”

It didn’t take long. Then, like he promised, he got up and turned the set on. The blackness went and exciting people came and went, singing, laughing, dancing. It was wonderful — as always. I forgot Mr. Kent.

And so it was all right again. I could come down freely. Mr. Kent was most always there. But it didn’t matter. We understood each other.

At night, with the television, I felt as though this house were mine.

But one night Mrs. Kent came down the stairs. Mr. Kent had sent me into the kitchen for a fresh bucket of ice. I heard her voice and waited in the entry, behind the swinging door.

“Paul — I thought I heard someone talking. What are you doing down here?”

He answered loudly. I think he wanted me to hear. “The TV. Just watching the TV.”

“Oh. Hadn’t you better go to bed? You’ve been drinking again. That isn’t helping you find a job, or write that book you keep talking about either.”

I heard him move. His voice got thick, like it was sometimes when he was with me on the sofa.

“Can I sleep in your room, Karen?”

“No. Not tonight. You know I can’t abide the smell of liquor.”

“No — you can’t, can you?” He stomped angrily across the room and I heard a click as he turned the television off. “In fact, you can’t really abide me, can you, Karen?”

“Not very often, Paul.” Her voice cracked like ice on the river.

I heard the loud sound and I pushed open the door to look. He had hit her and she fell as I watched, slowly, like a slow motion scene in an old movie. Her head made a funny noise against the bricks of the fireplace. We’d had watermelon once at the institute and somebody dropped one. It sounded like Mrs. Kent’s head did when it hit. Splonk.

He drew back, his mouth open, but making no sound. He leaned down over her and raised up. He looked around and I was careful to keep out of sight. He took a long taste from the bottle. Then he took hold of her feet and pulled her behind the sofa next to the wall. He pushed the sofa back over her. He went to the bathroom and brought a wet towel. He wiped the bricks. He took the towel away.

I was in the living room when he came back. The ice was on the table. I was turning the television set on.

He put his hand on mine and turned it off.

“How would you like a little vacation, Julia. A couple of weeks at the beach? In the city? Anywhere, anywhere at all.”

I kept my eyes down and my hands clasped lady-like behind me.

“I don’t think Miss Ascot would let me go.”

“Damn Miss Ascot.” Little beads of sweat stood out on his brow. He was thinking, hard. It was like watching a play — he was looking for a way out.

I poured him a drink. “Here, Mr. Kent. You don’t look so good. This will make you feel better.”

His hand went around the cold glass. His round blue eyes looked at me and suddenly they became flat and narrow.

The phone rang and he answered it. He talked for a while out in the hall and then came back. He didn’t know I went to the kitchen. He raised the glass to his lips; I knew Mr. Kent had found a way out.

He’s lying beside her now. I found the package high on a kitchen shelf where Mrs. Kent had told me to put it, away from the children. Rat poisoning, it said, with a red skull and crossbones. While Mr. Kent was out at the phone I put it into the whiskey.

He knew, I think, right away but he’d taken a huge swallow the way he always did and it was too late. It didn’t take long after that. It was easy, even for me, to see Mr. Kent’s only way out. Blame it on the hired girl. I’d seen that done on television at least a dozen times.

I wiped off fingerprints and put glasses in their hands — just long enough to leave their marks.

As soon as Steve Allen is over, I’ll go to bed.

Somebody will find them by morning. I hope the next house I go to has color. Twenty-four inch.